I 


UC-NRLF 


$B  2fln  -^i^B 


THE  LIBRARY 

OF 

THE  UNIVERSITY 

OF  CALIFORNIA 


GIFT  OF 

Professor 
Paul  S.  Taylor 


Digitized  by  the  Internet  Arcinive 

in  2007  with  funding  from 

IVIicrosoft  Corporation 


http://www.archive.org/details/comingofcoalOObrurich 


THE  COMING  OF  COAL 


BY 
ROBERT  W.  BRUERE 

OF     THE     BUREAU     OF 
INDUSTRIAL    RESEARCH 


Prepared  for 

The  Educational  Committee  of  the 

Commission  on  the  Church  and  Social  Service 

of  the 

Federal  Council  of  the 

Churches  of  Christ 

in  America 


ASSOCIATION   PRESS 

New  York:  347  Madison  Avenue 
1922 


Copyright,  1922,  by 
Robert  W.  Bruere 


PRINTED  IN  THE  UNITED  STATES  OF  AMERICA 


GIFT 


B7 


FOREWORD 

This  book,  important  in  subject  and  scientific  in 
method,  appears  under  religious  auspices  for  a  very 
definite  reason.  The  Educational  Committee  of  the  Fed- 
eral Council  of  Churches  has  sought  to  find  concrete 
expression  for  those  Christian  principles  which  are  too 
often  confined  to  abstract  statement.  Christian  ethics  are 
well  understood  in  theory.  There  is  need  now  for  a 
science  of  Christian  conduct  through  which  we  may 
realize  ethical  ideals  in  our  working  life. 

Because  of  its  basic  character  and  its  present  impor- 
tance in  the  public  mind  the  coal  industry  offers  a  field 
for  this  endeavor.  Hence  the  Educational  Committee 
presents  through  the  medium  of  the  Press  of  the  Young 
Men's  Christian  Association,  this  book,  addressed  par- 
ticularly to  the  people  of  the  churches  of  America. 

The  Educational  Committee. 


566 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 


CHAPTER 

PAGE 

I. 

Challenge  of  Power          .          .          .          .         1 

11. 

Coming  of  Coal 

4 

III. 

Drama  of  Civilization 

10 

IV. 

Coal  in  America 

22 

V. 

Awakening  of  the  Miners 

34 

VI. 

Struggle  for  Organization 

50 

VII. 

Rise  of  Democracy 

66 

VIII. 

Rivals  of  Coal 

78 

IX. 

The  Technical  Revolution 

90 

X. 

The  Strait  Gate 

Bibliography 

Index     .... 

102 
114 
120 

CHAPTER  I 
The  Challenge  of  Power 

Scientists  tell  us  that  the  energy  poured  by  the  sun  on 
the  Desert  of  Sahara  in  a  single  day  exceeds  by  fourfold 
the  energy  stored  in  the  annual  production  of  all  the  coal 
fields  in  the  world.  They  dream  of  a  time  when  the 
radiant  energy  of  the  sun  will  be  captured  and  turned  to 
the  uses  of  man.  Then  the  wheels  of  our  myriad  machines 
will  spin  with  the  sun  and  the  stars.  In  the  soft  whirr  of 
their  motors  men  will  hear  the  music  of  the  spheres. 

When  that  time  comes,  will  it  signal  the  triumph  of 
man's  will  over  nature,  the  end  of  the  brute  struggle  with 
hunger?  Will  it  find  our  ideals  of  cooperation,  service, 
and  brotherhood  ripe  for  practical  application  ?  Or  will  it 
mark  a  new  intensification  of  the  exploitation  of  man  by 
men,  of  the  clash  of  groups  for  power,  of  international 
wars  for  possession?  Shall  we  have  the  spiritual  capacity 
to  match  our  technical  achievement  ?  Shall  we  know  what 
we  mean  when  we  pray  Thy  Kingdom  Come  on  Earth 
as  IT  IS  in  Heaven  ? 

That  prayer  was  old  on  the  lips  of  men  when  a  compa- 
rable gift  was  discovered.  During  ages  without  number 
the  shifting  seas  and  the  slow-moving  mountains  had 
pressed  down  the  sun's  vintage  in  the  coal  beds  of  the 
earth.  Less  than  two  centuries  ago  the  steam  engine 
harnessed  coal  to  the  looms  of  England.  With  coal  came 
iron  and  steel,  and  with  steel  and  steam  came  the  indus- 


2  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

trial  revolution,  its  factories  massed  in  cities,  its  railroads 
weaving  manufacturing  centers  together,  its  steel  ships 
and  cables  and  telegraph  wires  unfolding  and  integrating 
the  economic  life  of  the  world.  In  western  Europe  espe- 
cially it  converted  an  age-long  economic  deficit  into  an 
economic  surplus.  For  the  first  time  in  human  history 
it  brought  the  possibility  of  the  good  life  to  every  man's 
door.  But  it  found  men  spiritually  unprepared.  The 
ancient  bread  hunger  was  still  upon  them.  As  in  the 
tribal  days  men  warred  upon  one  another  for  food,  so  now 
they  warred  upon  one  another  for  coal  and  the  incredible 
spawn  of  coal.  For  coal  means  food,  clothing,  houses, 
ships,  railroads,  newspapers,  chemicals,  and  guns.  With 
the  coming  of  coal  and  coal-driven  machinery  the  earth 
and  the  fullness  thereof  was  unlocked  for  the  service  of 
man.  There  was  not  only  the  possibility  of  the  good  life 
for  each  but  also  of  a  noble,  well-ordered  civilization  for 
all.  But  instead  of  establishing  civilization  on  founda- 
tions of  mutual  aid,  service,  and  brotherhood,  men  turned 
their  cities  into  shambles  of  childhood,  poverty  was  em- 
bittered, civil  strife  in  mine,  mill,  and  factory  became 
endemic,  wars  on  an  unprecedented  scale  engaged  nations 
and  groups  of  nations.  The  World  War  and  the  famine 
and  widespread  desolation  that  followed  gave  tragic  evi- 
dence of  our  spiritual  unpreparedness. 

Yet  it  would  be  as  falsely  sentimental  to  set  up  a  golden 
age  as  a  heightening  background  for  the  evils  that  came 
with  coal  as  it  would  be  to  ignore  or  gloze  over  those  evils. 
Economic  insecurity,  poverty,  disease,  wars,  and  blighted 
childhood  are  as  old  as  human  existence.  The  world  is  a 
better,  richer,  more  vibrant,  and  thrilling  abode  since  coal 
came  than  it  was  before.  The  indictment  of  our  coal  age 
can  be  justly  based,  not  upon  what  it  has  destroyed,  but 


THE  CHALLENGE  OF  POWER  3 

rather  upon  what  it  has  missed, — upon  its  spiritually- 
blind,  its  bungling  and  inadequate  use  of  a  gift  more 
magnificent  than  any  allotted  to  man  since  grain  was  first 
sown  to  the  harvest  and  ground  at  a  mill.  An  indictment 
that  involves  all  mankind  is  hardly  an  indictment  at  all. 
It  is  rather  a  confession  of  our  common  human  limita- 
tions, a  recognition  of  the  tragic  circumstances  of  our 
spiritual  growth.  It  will  be  answered  when  we  as  indi- 
viduals and  nations  and  groups  of  nations,  set  ourselves  to 
turn  the  wisdom  of  experience  to  account  in  building  a 
civilization  worthy  of  a  world  that  moves  through  infinite 
space  with  the  sun  and  the  marching  stars. 


CHAPTER  II 

The  Coming  of  Coal 

The  making  of  all  the  coal  in  the  earth  began  when  the 
sun  hurled  the  earth  into  its  orbit.  Before  there  were 
vertebrates  in  the  sea,  or  animals,  or  plants  of  any  kind  on 
land — fully  one  hundred  and  fifty  million  years  ago — low 
foldings  and  depressions  appeared  on  the  earth  where  the 
Appalachian  Mountains  now  are.  Following  the  lines  of 
what  has  become  the  Atlantic,  vast  ridges  appeared.  Ages 
later  swamp  forests  grew  in  the  intervening  valleys,  bear- 
ing and  shedding  the  spores  and  thick,  somber  leaves  still 
traceable  in  the  lower  carboniferous  strata.  In  that  time, 
a  shallow  sea  covered  what  is  now  the  Mississippi  Valley 
in  whose  sludgy  shoals  more  swamp  forests  grew.  Along 
the  inland  seas  and  ocean  beaches  of  Europe  and  Asia,  the 
tides,  the  winds,  and  rains  slowly  spread  the  clay  for  still 
other  swamp  forests.  When  the  lush  plant  life  of  the 
carboniferous  age  came  out  of  the  marshy  ooze,  it  spread 
along  the  edges  of  the  land,  crept  up  the  long  estuaries 
between  the  rising  and  sinking  hills  and  on  into  the  land- 
locked seas.  The  rocks  beneath  and  about  these  carbonif- 
erous forests  rose  and  sank  age  through  age,  cycle  through 
cycle.  When  they  sank  slowly,  tangled  morasses  formed ; 
when  they  sank  rapidly,  the  inrushing  water  killed  the 
plants  and  buried  them  under  a  covering  of  silt.  When 
the  rocky  strata  rose  again,  the  swamp  forests  crept  back 
to  their  old  places,  and  again  bore  and  shed  their  fernlike 


THE  COMING  OF  COAL  5 

leaves,  their  spores  and  great  scarred  trunks  upon  the 
oozy  bottom  now  scores  or  hundreds  of  feet  above  the 
level  on  which  their  ancestors  had  stood  ages  before. 

Then,  some  seventy  million  years  ago,  a  geographical 
revolution  convulsed  what  is  now  northeastern  America. 
The  great  trough  running  parallel  to  the  Atlantic,  where 
swamp  forests  had  grown  and  died  and  grown  again, 
gave  way  under  the  ever-increasing  load.  The  ridges  at 
its  sides  pressed  in  upon  it,  crumpled  it  into  giant  folds, 
broke  it,  pushed  its  shattered  edges  out  in  mighty  over- 
thrusts,  released  molten  rock  to  flow  up  and  over  its  torn 
surface.  The  whole  titanic  mass  was  racked  and  twisted 
with  pressure  and  heat  until  what  had  been  a  slowly  sub- 
siding sea-bottom,  covered  with  decaying  swamp  vegeta- 
tion, rose  on  the  shoulders  of  the  newborn  Appalachian 
Mountains,  then  a  lofty  range  of  clean,  stark  peaks 
stretching  from  Newfoundland  to  Arkansas, — ^two  thou- 
sand miles. 

And  with  this  great  geographical  revolution,  the  work 
of  making  coal  in  eastern  North  America  was  finished. 
From  the  softest  bituminous  to  the  hardest  anthracite, 
that  work  was  done. 

But  in  other  parts  of  the  world,  the  dense  carboniferous 
forests  continued  to  grow  for  another  fifty  or  more  mil- 
lion years.  In  the  shallows  of  the  Mississippi  Valley,  on 
the  shores  of  the  island  that  is  now  Colorado,  the  coal 
plants  grew  and  died  with  the  seasonal  march  of  the  sun. 
In  parts  of  Europe,  Russia,  and  China,  coal  continued  to 
form. 

And  then  came  another  geographical  revolution,  some 
twenty  million  years  ago,  that  raised  up  the  Rockies  and 
the  Andes  along  the  western  border  of  the  Americas,  tore 
and  twisted  and  upturned  the  rocks  of  Europe  and  Asia, 


6  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

until  with  the  exception  of  a  few  odd  pockets  where  small 
swamp  forests  lived  on  for  a  time,  the  coal  making  of  the 
whole  earth  was  ended. 

Twenty  million  years  ago,  all  the  coal  we  have  or  shall 
have  had  been  packed  away  beneath  the  ribs  of  the  earth, 
in  seams  varying  in  height  from  sixty  feet  to  the  thickness 
of  a  blade  of  grass.  In  many  places  the  flat  layers  in 
which  it  was  first  deposited  had  been  thrown  into  over- 
lapping folds.  Some  of  it  had  been  subjected  to  com- 
paratively little  heat  and  to  the  pressure  only  of  the  rocky 
strata  above  it;  this  is  the  bituminous,  which  is  still  rich 
in  oils,  gas,  tar — unreleased  volatile  matter.  Some  had 
been  crushed  by  the  weight  of  uplifted  mountains, 
roasted,  fused,  and  burned  by  molten  lava  and  volcanic 
flame;  this  is  anthracite,  which  is  almost  pure  carbon  and 
ash.  Some  had  been  exposed  to  greater  pressure  still,  to 
intenser  heat;  this  is  graphite,  which  can  no  longer  be 
burned  at  all. 

The  distribution  of  coal  in  the  world  by  quality  and 
quantity  has  been,  next  to  climate  and  the  fertility  of  the 
soil,  the  physical  fact  of  most  decisive  importance  in  the 
history  of  modern  civilization.  For  countless  ages  coal 
lay  practically  unused  in  the  earth.  Then,  sometime  be- 
tween 1750  and  1760,  an  intricate  interlocking  of  circum- 
stances set  coal  to  rule  the  world,  not  through  new  dis- 
coveries of  coal  itself  but  rather  through  improvements  in 
spinning  and  weaving  machinery  which  made  possible  the 
massing  of  large  numbers  of  spinners  and  weavers  for 
large-scale  production  if  power  could  be  found  to  drive 
the  new  machines  for  them.  The  steam  engine  had 
already  been  invented,  but  it  was  still  a  tentative  thing, 
a  primitive  type,  wondered  at  and  experimented  with. 
Coal  had  been  used,  but  only  in  a  few  favored  spots  where 


THE  COMING  OF  COAL  7 

it  cropped  out  on  the  earth's  surface,  or  was  washed 
ashore  by  the  sea,  and  then  only  as  a  domestic  fuel.  It 
was  at  the  call  of  the  master  weavers  and  spinners  of 
England  that  the  steam  engine  was  set  to  run  the  ma- 
chines ;  then  to  furnish  a  blast  so  that  coal  might  be  used 
to  cheapen  the  smelting  of  iron  and  steel  so  that  more 
machines  might  be  made ;  then  to  pump  out  the  deepening 
mines  so  that  more  and  more  power  to  keep  the  machines 
running  might  be  won.  Steam  raising  was  coal's  first 
great  play  for  power  and  it  is  the  work  through  which  it 
still  holds  its  industrial  supremacy.  Between  1800  and 
1900  coal-driven  engines  multiplied  until  by  the  end  of 
the  century  they  were  producing  energy  equivalent  to 
seventy  million  horse-power ;  during  the  first  twenty  years 
of  the  twentieth  century,  their  power-producing  capacity 
more  than  doubled.  So  coal  wrought  the  industrial  revo- 
lution, the  greatest  revolution  in  all  human  history,  which 
transformed  social  and  economic  life  as  radically  as  the 
geographical  revolution  transformed  the  earth's  surface. 

"It  introduced  a  new  race  of  men,"  writes  H.  de  B. 
Gibbins,  "men  who  work  with  machinery  instead  of  with 
their  hands,  who  cluster  together  in  cities  instead  of 
spreading  over  the  land,  men  who  trade  with  those  of 
other  nations  as  readily  as  with  those  of  their  own  town, 
men  whose  workshops  are  moved  by  the  great  forces  of 
nature  and  whose  market  is  no  longer  the  city  or  country 
but  the  world  itself." 

Measured  by  the  crude  standards  of  gross  wealth  and 
numbers,  the  people  of  the  earth  have  flourished  mightily 
since  the  dominion  of  coal  began.  The  aggregate  wealth 
of  the  world  has  increased  to  fabulous  proportions.  The 
average  expectation  of  life  among  Western  peoples  has 
doubled.    Between  1800  and  1910  the  world's  population 


8  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

rose  from  approximately  640,000,000  to  1,616,000,000. 
The  population  of  England,  which  had  increased  only 
fifteen  per  cent  from  1651  to  1751,  increased  two  hundred 
per  cent  during  the  next  century.  Between  1816  and 
1910,  the  population  of  France  increased  fifty  per  cent, 
of  Germany  three  hundred  per  cent,  of  the  United  States 
seventeen  hundred  per  cent. 

Moreover  the  drive  of  coal's  energy  immensely  stimu- 
lated men's  inventive  faculties.  It  transformed  Kay's 
"flying  shuttle"  and  Hargreaves'  "spinning  jenny"  from 
clever  toys  into  instruments  of  large-scale  production,  the 
crude  steam  engines  of  Newcomen  and  Watt  into  the 
great  modern  locomotive  and  the  turbine  engine ;  it  made 
possible  the  large-scale  production  of  telegraph  wires  and 
ocean  cables,  the  cylinder  press  and  typesetting  machines, 
the  electrical  dynamo,  the  internal-combustion  engine,  the 
aeroplane,  and  even  the  space-ranging  modern  telescope. 
It  lifted  the  veil  from  the  seven  seas,  broke  down  the 
physical  barriers  between  the  peoples  of  the  earth,  forged 
the  steel  framework  of  national  and  international  govern- 
ment. The  commercial  and  political  primacy  which  Eng- 
land held  for  more  than  one  hundred  and  fifty  years 
rested  upon  her  abundant  fields  of  easily  accessible  coal. 
The  cosmic  energy  flowing  out  from  her  mines  spread  her 
trade  and  her  surplus  population  to  the  four  corners  of  the 
earth  and  made  her  triumphant  over  Spain  and  Holland — 
nations  poor  in  coal.  The  coal  of  Westphalia,  associated 
with  the  iron  ores  of  Lorraine,  welded  the  States  of  Ger- 
many into  the  empire  of  the  latter  nineteenth  century  and 
hurled  her  green-grey  armies  across  her  frontiers  in  the 
mad  adventure  of  1914.  The  vast,  rich  coal  fields  of 
North  America  have  transformed  the  United  States  from 
an  agricultural  appanage  of  Europe  into  the  foremost 


THE  COMING  OF  COAL  9 

manufacturing  and  commercial  nation  in  the  world.  The 
future  of  Russia  lies  largely  in  the  coal  fields  of  the 
Donetz  basin.  The  imperfectly  surveyed  coal  and  ore 
fields  of  China  and  Siberia  are  probably  the  strongest  of 
the  magnets  drawing  the  Powers  into  the  problem  of  the 
Pacific.  Coal  and  the  continuing  industrial  revolution 
are  still  shaping  the  destiny  of  mankind. 

But  in  the  history  of  the  human  race  the  fact  of  tran- 
scending significance  is  the  presence  in  man  of  instincts, 
emotions,  mind,  reason,  will,  conscious  hunger,  and  con- 
scious love  of  one's  neighbor, — all  the  constituents  of  that 
personality  of  supreme  worth  whose  ceaseless  struggle 
for  mastery  over  the  forces  of  nature,  for  escape  from 
hunger,  want,  and  war  into  a  world  of  plenty,  beauty, 
mutual  aid,  and  service  is  the  epic  of  civilization.  The 
value  of  coal,  as  of  all  material  things,  finds  its  true  meas- 
ure not  in  numbers  or  horse-power  units,  but  in  its  effect 
upon  the  soul  of  man,  the  fullness  of  opportunity  enjoyed 
by  each  individual  for  self-realization  and  service,  the 
progress  of  the  race  toward  brotherhood.  The  ultimate 
appraisal  of  the  coal  age  will  be  determined  by  the  issue 
of  the  struggle  between  bread  hunger  and  love  in  the  soul 
of  man — ^the  struggle  between  his  acquisitive  instinct  and 
his  growing  consciousness  of  kind. 


CHAPTER  III 
The  Drama  of  Civilization 

Coal  embodies  our  chance  of  a  world  civilization.  It 
is  the  material  form  in  which  the  possibility  of  peace  and 
ease,  beauty  and  learning,  cooperation  and  brotherhood, 
have  come  to  the  human  race. 

Before  coal  was  harnessed  to  the  looms  of  England, 
before  the  stored  energy  of  the  sun  replaced  hand  labor 
at  the  wheels  and  gears  of  her  newly  invented  machines, 
there  was  no  such  thing  as  a  world  civilization.  There 
was  indeed  nothing  to  base  a  world  civilization  upon,  for 
civilization  implies  leisure  consciously  to  cooperate  with 
other  people,  to  make  life  not  merely  endurable  but  beau- 
tiful and  pleasant  as  well,  leisure  to  subordinate  the 
instinct  to  acquire  to  the  instinct  to  enjoy,  the  acquisitive 
instinct  to  the  consciousness  of  kind — and  the  race  as  a 
whole  had  its  entire  attention  f ocussed  on  the  effort  to  get 
enough  food  and  clothing  and  shelter  so  that  it  would 
live  and  not  die.  For  only  as  the  acquisitive  instinct  was 
dominant  and  successful  could  men  survive  either  singly 
or  in  groups,  before  the  coming  of  coal. 

The  limits  of  civilization  were  primarily  the  mechanical 
limitations  of  man's  ability  to  produce.  So  long  as  his 
only  ways  to  drive  machinery  were  by  wind  and  water, 
the  strength  of  domesticated  animals,  and  his  own  brawn, 
it  was  almost  impossible  for  him  to  accumulate  sufficient 
reserves  of  food  and  clothing  so  that  instead  of  thinking 


THE  DRAMA  OF  CIVILIZATION  11 

what  he  should  eat  and  what  he  should  put  on,  he  could 
think  a  little  of  how  to  make  life  good.  And  whenever  by- 
some  fortunate  chance  a  group  of  men  did  get  together  a 
small  hoard,  parallel  with  the  growth  of  each  tiny  surplus 
grew  the  hatred  of  the  outside  groups  who  wished  to 
possess  it,  and  the  need  to  defend  it  by  force.  So  that 
when  here  and  there  through  the  centuries  pocketed 
civilizations  did  arise,  they  were  civilizations  perpetually 
armed  for  defence  and  with  the  sword  in  their  hands. 
And  though  the  spirit  of  man  in  such  places  as  India  and 
Egypt,  in  China,  Persia,  Palestine,  Greece,  Carthage, 
Rome,  and  the  free  Italian  cities,  as  soon  as  the  pressure 
was  removed  ever  so  little,  did  flower  into  religion  and  art 
and  science,  these  favored  oases  were  surrounded  by 
crowding,  hungry  multitudes  who  pressed  in  and  in  till 
at  last  every  one  of  these  was  overwhelmed. 

Before  the  coming  of  coal  man  had  to  satisfy  his  long- 
ing for  peace  and  knowledge  and  companionship  through 
his  dreams.  These  have  come  down  to  us  in  the  legends 
of  India  and  Israel,  China,  Greece,  and  our  own  Nordic 
ancestors  which  perpetually  play  about  the  fabulous  treas- 
ure— ^the  Golden  Fleece,  the  land  of  milk  and  honey,  the 
Volsung's  miraculous  hoard — pathetic  symbols  of  plenty, 
Hberation,  and  the  possibility  of  brotherhood.  But  until 
coal  came  there  was  no  way  to  make  these  dreams  come 
true.  For  survival  was  only  to  the  strong,  or  to  the  cun- 
ning, or  to  those  who  were  willing  to  grow  fat  on  the 
leanness  of  others,  and  every  respite  from  the  basic  busi- 
ness of  keeping  alive  was  extravagantly  paid  for  either 
by  oneself  or  another — before  coal  came. 

But  with  the  coming  of  coal  there  rose  the  possibiHty  of 
producing  more  than  enough  to  keep  everybody  alive.  A 
tireless  bond  servant  had  been  given  to  the  race  whose 


12  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

power  grew  as  it  was  called  on,  until  now  in  the  United 
States  where  coal  is  used  most  indefatigably,  each  family- 
has  the  equivalent  of  thirty  human  servants,  whose  use 
does  not  need  to  involve  the  exploitation  of  man  by  man. 
For  the  first  time  there  is  the  possibility  of  all  having 
enough, — of  a  world  surplus  on  which  to  base  civilization. 

It  was  too  much  to  expect  that  this  possibility  should  be 
understood  by  a  race  which  had  never  before  got  further 
than  to  see  that  if  their  family,  their  town,  their  nation, 
was  to  have  ease  and  plenty,  it  must  be  quick  to  get  as 
much  of  the  world's  store  of  food  and  goods  as  it  could, — 
and  to  acquire  them  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  the  other 
groups,  who  were  hot  after  them  also,  might  perish  if  they 
did  not  get  their  share.  They  did  not  see  that  with  the 
coming  of  coal  the  supply  was  practically  unlimited,  and 
so  it  was  not  man's  sense  of  brotherhood  but  his  acquisi- 
tive instinct,  checked  and  balked  for  ages,  that  first  found 
channels  of  release  when  coal  came. 

After  the  coming  of  coal  this  acquisitive  instinct  ex- 
panded with  cosmic  force.  For  the  first  time  in  history, 
men  and  nations  thrilled  with  the  manifest  possibility  of 
their  escape  from  the  ancient  menace  of  hunger  into  a 
world  of  measureless  plenty.  In  their  greedy  rush  for 
possession,  men  within  nations  trampled  one  another 
under  foot,  and  nations  girded  themselves  for  world 
dominion.  And  as  wealth  flowed  into  the  village,  the 
town,  and  the  nation,  all  men  exulted,  those  who  them- 
selves had  nothing  as  well  as  those  who  grew  rich.  For 
famine  still  hovered  beyond  the  horizon,  and  the  very 
presence  in  the  community  of  an  economic  surplus,  by 
whomever  owned,  gave  all  men  a  sense  of  security  as 
though  at  last  they  had  won  the  miraculous  hoard  of 
their  dreams,  through  the  coming  of  coal. 


THE  DRAMA  OF  CIVILIZATION  13 

It  was  inevitable  that  in  this  cumulative  drive  of  the 
acquisitive  instinct  with  the  long-sought  surplus  almost  in 
sight,  the  attitude  of  mind  established  and  glorified  during 
the  ages  when  war  was  the  common  alternative  to  hunger, 
should  carry  over  into  factories  and  mines.  The  methods 
of  war, — the  ruthless  sacrifice  of  part  of  the  community 
for  the  benefit  of  the  rest, — were  the  only  methods  men 
understood.  The  new  possibiHty  had  arrived  but  the  old 
habit  of  mind  remained.  With  the  coming  of  coal  and 
the  beginning  of  the  industrial  revolution,  no  one  dreamed 
that  the  time  for  the  cessation  of  human  sacrifice  had 
arrived.  When  the  mines  were  first  opened,  the  slave 
trade  still  flourished  with  almost  universal  sanction. 

"It  is  a  slight  fact,"  wrote  Lecky,  "but  full  of  ghastly 
significance  as  illustrating  the  state  of  feehng  at  the  time, 
that  the  ship  in  which  Hawkins  sailed  on  his  second  expe- 
dition to  open  the  English  slave  trade  was  called  The 
Jesus." 

This  voyage  was  made  a  hundred  years  before  the  har- 
nessing of  coal,  but  in  the  middle  of  the  eighteenth  cen- 
tury and  far  into  the  nineteenth  much  the  same  state  of 
feeling  widely  prevailed.  The  first  miners  in  Scotland 
were  serfs;  the  first  miners  in  northern  England  were 
bondsmen  who  sold  themselves  by  the  year  and  were 
forbidden  by  law  to  leave  the  mine  to  which  they  were 
bound. 

"At  that  time,"  write  J.  L.  and  Barbara  Hammond, 
basing  their  account  on  the  report  of  the  Parliamentary 
Committee  on  the  Employment  of  Children  and  Young 
Persons  (1842),  "boys  were  employed  everywhere,  girls 
in  certain  districts,  Lancashire,  Cheshire,  the  West  Rid- 
ing, and  South  Wales,  besides  Scotland.  Children  were 
employed  as  trappers,  that  is  to  open  and  shut  the  doors 


14  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

that  guided  the  draught  of  air  through  the  mine;  as 
fillers,  that  is  to  fill  the  skips  and  carriages  when  the  men 
have  hewn  the  coal ;  and  as  pushers,  or  hurriers,  that  is, 
to  push  the  trucks  along  from  the  workers  to  the  foot  of 
the  shaft.  But  in  some  mines  these  trucks  were  drawn 
instead  of  being  pushed.  *A  girdle  is  put  round  the 
naked  waist,  to  which  a  chain  from  the  carriage  is  hooked 
and  passed  between  the  legs,  and  the  boys  crawl  on  their 
hands  and  knees,  drawing  the  carriage  after  them.'  In 
the  early  days  of  the  century  this  arrangement  was  very 
common,  and  women  and  girls  were  so  employed.  By 
1842  it  was  more  usual  to  have  small  iron  railways,  and 
the  carriages  were  pushed  along  them.  The  trapping  was 
done  everywhere  by  children,  generally  from  five  to  eight 
years  of  age.  A  girl  of  eight  years  old  described  her  day: 
*I'm  a  trapper  in  the  Gamber  Pit.  I  have  to  trap  without 
a  light,  and  I'm  scared.  I  go  at  four  and  sometimes  half- 
past  three  in  the  morning  and  come  out  at  five  and  half- 
past.  I  never  go  to  sleep.  Sometimes  I  sing  when  I've 
light,  but  not  in  the  dark ;  I  dare  not  sing  then.  .  .  .'  In 
the  West  Riding  the  work  of  hurrying  or  pushing  the 
corves  was  often  done  by  girls  at  the  time  of  the  report : 
'Chained,  belted,  harnessed  like  dogs  in  a  go-cart,  black, 
saturated  with  wet,  and  more  than  half  naked — crawling 
upon  their  hands  and  feet,  and  dragging  their  heavy  loads 
behind  them — ^they  present  an  appearance  indescribably 
disgusting  and  unnatural.'  .  .  .  The  children  who  suf- 
fered most  were  the  apprentices  from  the  workhouse; 
'these  lads  are  made  to  go  where  other  men  will  not  let 
their  own  children  go.  If  they  will  not  do  it,  they  take 
them  to  the  magistrates  who  commit  them  to  prison.'  .  .  . 
In  mines  with  thick  seams  it  was  usual  to  make  good 
roads,  but  in  less  profitable  mines  the  roads  were  just 


THE  DRAMA  OF  CIVILIZATION  15 

large  enough  to  enable  small  children  to  get  the  corves 
along  them.  ...  It  was  reported  that  there  was  much 
more  cruelty  in  the  Halifax  pits  than  in  those  of  Leeds 
and  Braseford.  A  sub-commissioner  met  a  boy  crying 
and  bleeding  from  a  wound  in  the  cheek,  and  his  master 
explained  'that  the  child  is  one  of  the  slow  ones,  who 
would  only  move  when  he  saw  blood,  and  that  by  throw- 
ing a  piece  of  coal  at  him  for  that  purpose  he  had  accom- 
plished his  object,  and  that  he  often  adopted  the  like 
means.'  " 

The  entire  community  sanctioned  these  practices,  not 
the  employers  only ;  for  generations  even  the  miners  them- 
selves acquiesced  in  them.  Those  who  were  sacrificed  in 
the  mines  and  factories  were  victims  of  the  entire  con- 
suming community's  war  against  hunger;  the  furious 
drive  of  the  acquisitive  instinct  on  the  one  hand,  and  also 
of  the  passionate  longing  of  all  men  to  escape  from  eco- 
nomic bondage  into  security,  plenty,  economic  and  spirit- 
ual freedom.  It  was  war  of  a  disastrous  sort  but  the 
world  of  that  day  saw  no  alternative, — could  see  no  alter- 
native from  the  experience  of  the  race.  Until  as  individ- 
uals, and  nations  and  associations  of  nations,  we  have 
won  a  stable  economic  surplus  and  the  spiritual  maturity 
to  use  and  distribute  that  surplus  for  the  benefit  of  the 
whole  community,  we  shall  not  in  our  hearts  condemn  war 
as  immoral,  whether  it  be  a  military  or  an  industrial  war. 
Always  we  shall  contrive  to  believe  that  what  is  necessary 
for  us  is  necessarily  good. 

People  in  general  deplored  the  horrors  of  mining  just 
as  before  the  coming  of  coal  they  had  deplored  the  horrors 
of  the  wars  they  had  waged  in  order  to  survive,  but  the 
fact  remained  that  if  the  golden  promise  of  the  industrial 
revolution  was  to  be  realized  they  must  have  coal^  and 


16  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

what  other  way  was  there  to  get  it?  At  least  part  of  the 
world  was  living  in  comfort  and  security. 

As  a  matter  of  fact  a  fair  share  of  the  community 
attained  reasonable  comfort  after  the  coming  of  coal. 
The  acquisitive  instinct  succeeded  in  piling  up  a  vast  per- 
manent capital  which  was  enjoyed  by  a  large  proportion 
of  the  human  race.  It  had  not  come  through  increased 
production  alone.  Raiding  and  exploitation,  both  com- 
mercial and  military,  had  helped  mightily,  for  the  old 
method  of  feeding  yourself  from  your  neighbor's  hoard 
was  tremendously  accelerated  for  those  peoples  whose 
manufactures  and  transportation  were  driven  by  the 
power  of  coal.  That  the  exploited  peoples  suffered  in 
proportion  as  the  raiding  peoples  prospered  is,  of  course, 
true,  but  among  the  dominant  peoples  themselves  the 
acquisitive  instinct  had  begotten  a  mutual  consciousness. 
Throughout  those  parts  of  the  world  where  coal  had 
induced  the  industrial  revolution,  a  common  civilization 
had  sprung  up.  Parallel  with  the  triumphant  acquisitive 
instinct  had  developed  the  spirit  of  brotherhood  and 
mutual  aid  which  limited  and  controlled  it.  The  feeling 
of  fellowship  which  breeds  civilization  was  practically 
coextensive  with  the  augmented  surplus  produced  through 
the  coming  of  coal.  Coal-driven  transportation  was  good 
enough  so  that  a  famine  in  one  land  could  be  met  by  the 
heavy  crops  from  another  place :  the  fighting  of  disease, 
the  utilization  of  patents,  the  exchange  of  ideas,  of  luxu- 
ries, of  scientific  knowledge,  of  passports,  of  fashions,  and 
of  food,  became  international  throughout  a  large  part  of 
the  world.  Mankind  began  to  approach  a  world  civiliza- 
tion because  since  the  coming  of  coal  to  kill  or  starve  was 
no  longer  the  inevitable  choice. 

That  this  alternative  has  even  a  chance  of  operating  is 


THE  DRAMA  OF  CIVILIZATION  17 

due  to  the  play  and  interplay  of  the  two  great  funda- 
mental instincts  in  the  soul  of  man — the  acquisitive 
instinct  through  which  he  learned  to  use  coal  to  pile  up  the 
material  surplus  that  made  civilization  possible ;  and  that 
other  impulse,  an  offspring  of  the  acquisitive  instinct, 
which  has  swung  into  opposition  to  its  parent  but  without 
whose  help  that  parent  could  never  have  achieved  a  sur- 
plus on  a  large  scale,  the  instinct  of  brotherhood,  of 
mutual  aid,  of  cooperation.  For  without  cooperation 
among  men  there  would  have  been  lacking  the  tremendous 
advantage  of  division  of  labor  and  mass  production,  and 
no  surplus,  however  large  and  secure  it  might  have  been, 
could  have  resulted  in  civilization  except  through  mutual 
aid.  Men  learned  to  work  together  in  order  to  survive; 
they  learned  to  enjoy  the  results  of  their  labor  together 
in  order  to  become  civilized.  These  two  impulses  are 
woven  together  in  man's  history  from  the  start  and  it  is 
according  as  one  or  the  other  predominates  that  we  de- 
velop a  civilization  on  the  basis  of  our  economic  surplus, 
or  merely  continue  to  exist  and  fight.  This  instinct  of 
mutual  aid  is  as  truly  a  cosmic  force  as  the  acquisitive 
instinct. 

"The  original  and  elementary  subjective  fact  in  society 
is  the  consciousness  of  kind,"  writes  Professor  Gid- 
dings,  ".  .  .  It  is  the  basis  of  class  distinction,  of  innu- 
merable forms  of  alliance,  of  rules  of  intercourse,  and  of 
pecuharities  of  policy.  ...  It  is  about  the  consciousness 
of  kind  as  a  determining  principle,  that  all  other  motives 
organize  themselves  in  the  evolution  of  social  choice, 
social  volition,  or  social  policy." 

In  any  attempt  to  understand  the  function  of  coal  in 
the  development  of  human  society,  it  is  necessary  to  re- 
member the  universal  democratic  tendency  of  men  simi- 


18  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

larly  circumstanced,  to  organize  into  defensive  and  of- 
fensive groups.  They  organize  into  bar  associations, 
medical  societies,  religious  denominations,  manufacturers' 
associations,  and  trade  unions  in  obedience  to  a  principle 
as  pervasive  in  the  animate  as  the  force  of  gravitation  is 
in  the  material  world.  While  the  primary  driving  force 
behind  each  group  as  it  organizes  is  the  acquisitive 
instinct,  the  natural  reaching  out  for  the  means  of  sub- 
sistence, for  v^ages,  fees,  profits ;  for  food,  clothing,  shel- 
ter, then  for  more  food,  more  clothing,  better  shelter, 
still  the  actual  attainment  of  the  surplus  makes  possible 
the  widening  operation  of  the  consciousness  of  kind,  and 
turns  men's  minds  toward  all  those  attributes  that  are 
characteristic  of  the  good  life  in  which  both  the  individual 
personality  and  also  the  spiritual  being  of  the  group,  the 
nation,  and  the  race  find  fruition.  For  an  economic  sur- 
plus is  merely  the  condition  of  the  good  life,  and  the  end 
to  which  the  human  spirit  forever  strives  to  direct  the 
use  of  the  surplus,  is  the  good  life  itself — a  worthy 
civilization. 

If  the  consciousness  of  kind  had  spread  evenly  like  a 
rising  tide  drawn  by  the  swelling  surplus  of  the  age  of 
coal,  a  world  civilization  might  have  quickly  come.  But 
it  worked  unevenly  and  erratically.  Sometimes  it  spread 
thinly  over  whole  nations  in  the  form  of  political  beliefs 
and  produced  theoretical  democracies  functioning  through 
the  franchise.  Sometimes  it  left  the  forms  of  government 
severely  monarchical  and  produced  a  spotty  economic 
growth  in  the  form  of  cooperative  societies  that  func- 
tioned in  response  to  the  everyday  bread  and  butter 
needs.  Sometimes  it  brought  those  having  similar  occu- 
pations together  in  guilds  and  trade  unions,  that  tended 
to  ignore  mere  political  boundaries  and  make  men  inter- 


THE  DRAMA  OF  CIVILIZATION  19 

nationally  conscious  of  each  other  through  the  way  they 
got  their  living.  But  everywhere  the  rising  consciousness 
of  kind  came  upon  obstructions  and  divisions.  Waves 
hurrying  up  innocent-looking  estuaries  would  come  upon 
other  streams  from  the  same  great  source,  and  meet  in 
spluttering,  frothing  conflict:  a  long  even  swell  of 
brotherly  feeling  would  break  over  some  rock  of  ances- 
tral race  prejudice  in  disaster  and  bloodshed;  mutual 
aid  rose  in  a  murky  troubled  sea,  wave  against  wave,  one 
current  trying  to  beat  another  current  back.  People 
united  into  a  political  nation  opposed  themselves  violently 
to  those  united  into  some  economic  class  within  it.  Men 
were  driven  apart  when  the  interests  of  their  group  con- 
flicted with  the  interests  of  other  groups  almost  as 
strongly  as  they  were  drawn  together  by  common  interest 
within  their  own  organization. 

And  always  the  rise  of  any  new  group  within  a  fairly 
comfortable  community  met  opposition  from  some  already 
established  group  whose  privileges,  powers,  and  posses- 
sions the  new  group  tended  to  infringe.  They  inevitably 
appeared  like  an  invading  tribe  bent  on  pillage,  and  the 
community  gathered  shoulder  to  shoulder  to  resist  them, 
every  thought  and  muscle  set  to  repel  what  they  saw  as 
an  attack  on  the  common  surplus  and  in  defence  of  those 
whose  guardianship  of  the  common  hoard  had  afforded 
them  a  new  measure  of  comfort. 

This  has  been  particularly  true  of  all  organizations,  due 
to  the  spread  of  consciousness  of  kind  among  the  workers 
and  their  efforts  to  get  for  themselves  a  larger  share  of 
the  benefits  of  the  common  surplus.  Very  rarely  has  the 
community  been  able  to  see  that  what  was  distributed  in 
the  form  of  advanced  wages  and  better  conditions  was 


20  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

not  necessarily  taken  away  from  the  community  as  a 
whole. 

When  the  coal  miners,  actuated  by  the  consciousness  of 
kind,  began  to  organize  for  mutual  aid  and  defence,  the 
community  at  large  as  well  as  the  mine  owners  condemned 
them  as  subversive  conspirators,  not  only  against  their 
lawful  masters,  but  also  against  the  general  peace  and 
well-being  of  the  nation,  which  was  quite  obviously 
flourishing, — piling  up  a  surplus  with  national  security  as 
a  by-product, — by  reason  of  the  thousands  of  tons  of  coal 
which  the  newly  organized  group  might  conceivably  cur- 
tail. It  was  the  community  as  a  whole,  not  the  employers 
only,  that  sanctioned  the  use  of  the  courts  and  the  military 
against  the  miners'  union,  as  they  would  have  counte- 
nanced their  use  against  soldiers  who  mutinied. 

Only  slowly  is  our  community,  to  which  the  coming  of 
coal  has  given  the  chance  to  develop  a  world  civilization, 
beginning  to  see  that  neither  the  acquisitive  instinct 
through  which  men  pile  up  a  surplus,  nor  the  conscious- 
ness of  kind  through  which  they  organize  to  build  up  a 
civilization,  is  the  result  of  individual  perversity  or 
caprice.  Unions  and  employers'  associations  arise  in 
obedience  to  a  fundamental  law  of  human  conduct,  they 
are  the  means  by  which  society  wins  its  way  out  of  chaos 
and  anarchy  into  peace  and  orderly  government.  Through 
such  group  organizations  men  develop  the  understanding 
of  one  another  and  of  the  community  at  large,  which  is 
the  foundation  of  brotherhood  and  civilized  life.  It  is 
through  them  that  the  community  develops  standards  of 
living;  it  is  through  them  that  the  ideals  of  cooperation 
acquire  reality.  It  is  by  the  acquisitive  instinct  that  men 
live;  it  is  by  the  consciousness  of  kind,  the  instinct  of 
mutual  aid  and  cooperation,  that  men  are  transformed 


THE  DRAMA  OF  CIVILIZATION  21 

into  human  beings.  The  interplay  of  these  forces  makes 
the  history  of  civilization — of  nations  and  the  great  basic 
industries  within  the  nations.  They  are  the  flying  shut- 
tles with  which  man  at  Time's  loom  weaves  "the  living 
garment  of  God." 


CHAPTER  IV 
Coal  in  America 

The  human  significance  of  coal  lies  in  the  effect  which 
the  release  of  its  energy  has  exercised  upon  the  struggle 
between  the  acquisitive  instinct  and  the  consciousness  of 
kind  for  ascendancy  over  the  soul  of  man.  Through  its 
creature,  the  industrial  revolution,  it  has  given  man  com- 
mand of  an  economic  surplus  and  set  him  free  to  win  the 
good  life  for  each  individual  and  to  substitute  mutual  aid 
for  war  in  international  relations  if  he  will. 

But  the  first  effect  of  coal  was  not  to  usher  in  the  good 
life  but  to  intensify  the  ancient  struggle,  widening  its 
stage  from  pocketed  civilizations  to  the  world.  For  more 
than  a  hundred  and  fifty  years,  the  abundant  and  readily 
accessible  coal  of  Great  Britain  made  her  the  protagonist 
in  the  world  drama.  Her  acquisitive  instinct,  charged 
with  cosmic  energy,  shot  lines  of  imperial  expansion  out 
across  the  seas  to  America,  India,  Australia,  China,  and 
Africa.  Her  coal-created  wealth  enabled  her  to  maintain 
the  mastery  of  the  ocean  highways  which  she  had  won 
from  Spain  and  Holland  and  to  hold  it  against  Napoleonic 
France  and  later  against  imperial  Germany.  It  gave  her 
an  economic  surplus  upon  the  basis  of  which  the  con- 
sciousness of  kind  welded  her  people  into  one  nation  and 
ended  the  civil  wars  which  from  the  time  of  the  Danish 
invasion  and  the  landing  of  William  the  Conqueror  had 
kept  each  little  group  within  the  island  armed  against 
every  other  little  group.     And  it  transformed  her  with 


COAL  IN  AMERICA  23 

jarring  rapidity  into  a  country  that  lived  by  manufacture 
and  by  trade  and  supported  a  far  larger  population  than 
could  have  lived  upon  the  island  if  it  had  been  merely 
an  agricultural  country  raising  its  own  food. 

In  order  that  this  swelling  population  might  go  on  get- 
ting coal  out  of  the  mines  and  turning  out  products  from 
the  factories  it  must  be  adequately  and  cheaply  fed.  The 
place  where  its  food  came  from  was  chiefly  America. 
During  the  hundred  and  fifty  years  of  England's  primacy, 
America  was  not  only  her  granary  but  increasingly  the 
granary  of  other  nations,  and  the  great  reservoir  for  all 
their  overflowing  populations.  For  the  industrial  revo- 
lution in  England  was  followed  by  the  harnessing  of  coal 
in  France,  then  in  Germany,  then  later  in  Japan,  and  this 
set  in  motion  among  them  the  processes  of  imperial 
expansion,  whose  friction  and  clash  culminated  in  the 
World  War. 

It  was  as  necessary  to  the  success  of  the  industrial  revo- 
lution, particularly  in  specialized  little  England,  that  the 
surplus  populations  which  were  poured  by  the  million  into 
America  should  send  back  food  to  Europe,  as  it  was  that 
their  factory  machines  should  have  coal  to  drive  them. 
This  interdependence  was  not  conscious,  not  a  deliberate 
effort  on  either  side,  but  it  was  an  extremely  practical 
fact  nevertheless.  In  order  that  England  might  live  by 
trade,  some  other  land  must  live  by  agriculture,  and 
during  the  first  hundred  and  fifty  years  of  the  industrial 
revolution  that  land  was  America. 

To  live  by  agriculture  was  an  easy  thing  in  the  New 
World,  easier  than  it  had  ever  been  anywhere  before, — 
to  live  and  to  feed  a  continent  besides.  For  America  is 
the  only  great  modern  nation  whose  history  is  written 
not  against  a  background  of  famine  but  against  a  back- 


24  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

ground  of  economic  abundance.  After  the  first  thin 
stream  of  colonial  adventurers  and  exiles  for  conscience' 
sake  had  established  themselves  upon  the  Atlantic  coast, 
her  seemingly  boundless  domain  opened  up  before  the 
hungry  millions  of  Europe  Hke  the  promised  land  of  milk 
and  honey.  Unlike  the  peoples  of  the  great  Asiatic  and 
European  folk-wanderings,  they  found  no  comparably 
developed  peoples  to  bar  their  way.  As  they  spread  from 
the  Atlantic  to  the  Blue  Ridge  and  Alleghenies,  then 
along  the  Great  Lakes  and  down  the  Ohio ;  on  across  the 
Mississippi,  the  Kansas  prairies,  the  Great  Desert,  the 
Sierras  and  Rockies  to  California  and  the  Golden  Gate, 
they  found  only  hunting  tribes  or  the  fading  remnants  of 
cliff-dwelling  and  primitive  agricultural  clans.  These 
they  could  meet  not  only  with  effective  weapons  of 
defence  but  also  with  a  highly  developed  agricultural 
technique. 

At  first  America's  planless  prosperity  had  little  to  do 
with  coal  and  nothing  at  all  with  manufacture.  It  was 
a  prosperity  made  up  of  the  sum  of  her  food  products, 
and  men  skimmed  the  soil  and  the  forests  with  only  one 
thought,  to  make  that  sum  immediately  great.  Exploita- 
tion got  into  their  blood.  It  was  the  method  by  which  they 
grew  rich,  and  when  the  wealth  of  the  coal  deposits  was 
added  to  the  wealth  of  the  fields  and  forests,  they  carried 
the  same  methods  of  planless  exploitation  over  into  the 
coal  mines.  England  must  still  depend  on  them  for  food, 
but  they  did  not  have  to  depend  so  abjectly  on  her  for 
manufactures  after  the  industrial  revolution  crossed  the 
Atlantic  at  the  call  of  the  Pennsylvania  coal  fields. 

After  the  industrial  revolution  harnessed  their  unique 
reservoirs  of  coal,  the  people  of  the  United  States  enjoyed 
a  degree  of  economic  security  such  as  no  other  people  ever 


COAL  IN  AMERICA  25 

enjoyed.  Had  they  been  spiritually  prepared,  they  might 
have  used  this  economic  abundance  to  establish  brother- 
hood among  men.  But  after  all,  they  themselves  were 
Europeans  who  had  fled  from  the  ancient  tyranny  of 
hunger.  To  them  America  was  naturally  more  an  escape 
from  that  haunting  menace  than  a  challenge  to  the  good 
life.  Here  and  there,  as  in  the  Puritan  theocracy,  they 
heard  and  tried  to  obey  the  challenge.  But  they  were 
not  prepared. 

The  hungry  immigrant  millions  swarmed  across  the 
continent,  laying  waste  the  forests,  skimming  the  fresh 
fertile  soil,  growing  prosperous  by  destruction  rather  than 
by  thrift  and  planful  use.  They  caroused  and  swaggered 
like  prodigals.  They  glorified  mere  acquisition,  measuring 
a  man's  worth  by  the  money  he  owned.  As  they  filled 
the  continent,  the  old  world  fever  of  imperial  expansion 
entered  their  blood.  They  seized  Cuba  and  the  Philip- 
pines, Plaiti  and  Santo  Domingo.  They  set  about  build- 
ing the  greatest  navy  in  the  world.  After  a  few  falter- 
ing efforts  to  lead  the  warring  nations  to  peace  through 
conference  and  conciliation,  they  threw  the  weight  of 
their  wealth  and  numbers  into  the  balance  and  with  fire 
and  sword  imposed  a  victorious  peace.  And  they  were 
able  to  do  this  in  the  last  analysis  because  of  the  enor- 
mous power  of  their  coal  supply,  for  coal  in  a  modern 
industrial  civilization  means  guns  and  munitions  of  war, 
transportation  systems  to  set  armies  in  the  field,  and  the 
ability  to  supply  them  after  they  get  there.  America's 
coal-wrought  wealth  made  her  decisive  in  battle.  Even 
so  today  her  unique  reserves  of  coal  make  her  the  arbiter 
between  peace  and  war.  Possessed  of  the  richest  coal 
fields  in  the  world,  she  holds  the  destiny  of  the  nations 
in  her  hands.     For  coal  has  grown  to  mean  food  and 


26  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

clothing  and  shelter,  transportation  and  communica- 
tion, and  the  economic  surplus  and  the  leisure  without 
which  science,  invention,  art,  representative  government, 
democratic  education,  and  enlightened  organized  religion 
would  atrophy  and  perish. 

Since  coal  means  all  these  things,  and  since  America 
owns  the  world's  greatest  available  reserves  of  coal,  it  is 
obvious  that  the  manner  in  which  her  people  develop  and 
govern  their  coal  fields  is  of  crucial  importance,  not  only 
to  themselves,  but  also  to  the  rest  of  the  world.  Before 
the  United  States  entered  the  World  War,  her  people 
were  hardly  aware  of  this  fact;  even  the  momentous 
experience  of  the  war  has  but  dimly  impressed  its  mean- 
ing upon  the  national  mind. 

Our  coal  measures  underlie  an  area  of  more  than  four 
hundred  and  sixty  thousand  square  miles.  They  contain 
almost  four  thousand  billion  tons  of  lignite,  bituminous, 
semibituminous,  anthracite,  and  semianthracite  coals. 
About  two-fifths  of  the  world's  annual  output  is  mined  in 
the  United  States. 

The  very  abundance  of  the  supply  has  made  us  enor- 
mously wasteful  in  its  exploitation,  as  we  have  been  waste- 
ful in  the  exploitation  of  our  forests.  Unlike  the  forests, 
coal  once  destroyed  does  not  grow  again.  The  most  valu- 
able of  our  coals  are  in  the  Appalachian  bituminous  fields 
that  stretch  from  northern  Pennsylvania  to  Alabama,  and 
in  which  some  of  the  best  sections  have  already  been 
gutted  and  abandoned.  In  our  greedy  grasp  for  wealth, 
we  have  left  one  ton  of  coal  to  waste  underground  for 
every  ton  we  have  brought  to  the  surface.  More  than  one 
hundred  and  fifty  thousand  miners  have  been  drawn  into 
the  mines  in  excess  of  efficient  requirements.  Planless 
overexpansion  of  the  industry  has  resulted  in  such  irregu- 


COAL  IN  AMERICA  27 

lar  operation  of  plant  and  equipment  that  for  more  than 
a  generation  the  miners  have  lost  an  average  of  ninety- 
three  days  in  the  working  year  of  three  hundred  and  eight 
days,  and  a  needless  overhead  charge  has  been  imposed 
upon  the  consumer  which  Mr.  F.  G.  Tryon  of  the  U.  S. 
Geological  Survey  calculates  at  a  million  dollars  for  each 
working  day.  Planless  exploitation  has  made  the  most 
basic  of  our  basic  industries  the  prey  of  technical  ineffi- 
ciency and  social  unrest,  the  extent  of  which  we  as  a 
people  ignored  until  they  threatened  national  and  interna- 
tional disaster  at  the  crisis  of  the  war. 

This  trouble  might  have  gone  on  some  time  longer 
undiagnosed  if  we  had  not  met  our  first  modern  national 
emergency  in  1917.  Of  necessity  the  weight  of  the  mili- 
tary structure  was  added  to  the  weight  of  the  industrial 
civil  structure  and  the  combined  load  was  more  than  the 
coal  industry  could  bear.  It  bent  and  broke  under  it,  and 
in  order  to  prosecute  the  war,  the  government  was  forced 
to  take  hold  of  the  formless  inchoate  thing  and  reshape  it 
into  a  stable  prop  for  the  national  need.  As  a  first  step  it 
was  necessary  to  find  out  what  this  great  unwieldy  coal 
industry  was. 

Coal  mines  are  systems  of  tunnels  driven  into  the  veins 
where  they  crop  out  along  the  slopes  of  hills,  or  from  the 
foot  of  shafts  sunk  through  the  overlying  strata.  These 
tunnels  run  for  miles  underground.  Secondary  tunnels 
run  from  the  main  tunnel  or  heading  into  the  rooms  where 
the  miners  work.  The  surveyor's  diagram  of  a  mine 
looks  like  a  crushed  centipede.  The  getting  of  coal  out  of 
the  mines,  after  it  has  been  picked  or  blasted  down  by  the 
miner,  like  its  distribution  after  it  is  brought  to  the  sur- 
face, is  almost  entirely  a  problem  of  transportation. 

Even  in  times  of  peace  our  railroad  transportation  was 


28  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

an  intricate  and  complicated  thing.  It  had  been  repeatedly- 
regulated  and  re-regulated  to  bring  it  more  in  line  with 
community  needs.  Among  other  regulations  was  a  law, 
designed  to  give  the  public  the  benefit  of  as  much  compe- 
tition between  operators  as  possible,  which  required  the 
railroads  to  furnish  sidings  and  cars  to  all  coal  mines  in 
proportion  to  their  production,  with  a  preferential  provi- 
sion for  new  operations.  The  double  demand  for  coal 
sent  up  prices  and  the  rise  in  prices  led  to  the  opening  of 
new  coal  mines  and  the  re-working  of  old  abandoned  ones. 
All  the  eleven  thousand  mines,  scattered  more  or  less  at 
random  over  thousands  of  square  miles  of  territory, 
clamored  for  their  legal  quota  of  cars  and  transportation 
to  market.  This  competitive  din  aggravated  the  confu- 
sion upon  our  already  overtaxed  railroads.  At  the  critical 
moment  when  the  essential  movement  of  troops  and  muni- 
tions was  straining  the  resources  of  the  railroads,  the 
sprawling  coal  industry  made  their  task  impossible. 

In  peace  times  one-third  of  our  ordinary  bituminous 
production  is  used  to  generate  steam  for  transportation, 
and  more  than  one-third  of  all  the  tonnage  carried  by  the 
railroads  is  coal.  The  weight  of  the  coal  which  the  rail- 
roads normally  carry  is  double  the  weight  of  iron  ore, 
steel,  lumber,  wheat,  corn,  oats,  and  hay  combined.  The 
problem  of  hauling  this  huge  load  is  needlessly  compli- 
cated by  competitive  cross-shipments  of  coal  from  one 
mining  state  into  or  across  another.  The  producers  of 
Illinois,  Pennsylvania,  and  Indiana  sell  their  coal  in  from 
eighteen  to  twenty  states,  many  of  them  coal-mining 
states.  A  part  of  this  cross-shipment  is  necessary,  be- 
cause certain  mining  states  like  Illinois,  for  example,  do 
not  produce  the  grade  of  coking  coal  which  their  steel 
plants  need  and  which  must,  therefore,  be  brought  from 


COAL  IN  AMERICA  29 

West  Virginia  or  southern  Pennsylvania.  But  most  of  it 
is  due  to  blind  competitive  planlessness  and  waste. 

Upon  this  tangled  mesh  the  critical  demands  of  the  war 
placed  a  crushing  burden.  The  nation's  safety  made  it 
imperative  not  only  that  coal  should  be  produced,  but  that 
it  should  be  delivered  where  it  was  needed.  The  miners 
were  digging  more  coal  than  had  ever  been  produced  be- 
fore, yet  cries  of  coal  shortage  went  up  from  domestic 
consumers  and  manufacturers  all  over  the  land.  The  rail- 
roads themselves  resorted  to  the  confiscation  of  coal  in 
transit  to  keep  their  engines  running.  To  avert  impend- 
ing catastrophe  to  the  nation  and  the  world,  the  national 
consciousness  of  kind  asserted  itself  over  the  acquisitive 
instinct  of  individuals  and  groups,  and  through  the  fed- 
eral government  created  the  Fuel  Administration  which 
brought  the  mines  under  unified  public  control  and  con- 
verted the  coal  industry,  for  the  period  of  the  war,  into 
a  unified  public  service. 

From  the  high  central  tower  of  the  Fuel  Administra- 
tion, the  people  of  the  United  States  for  the  first  time 
caught  a  fleeting  glimpse  of  the  coal  industry  as  a  whole 
and  of  the  relation  it  bears  to  the  national  and  interna- 
tional industrial  life.  They  discovered  that  coal  bears 
much  the  same  relation  to  our  modern  industrial  structure 
that  the  water  supply  bears  to  the  life  of  a  great  munici- 
pality. When  America  entered  the  war,  she  resembled 
with  respect  to  her  primary  source  of  mechanical  energy 
a  municipality  dependent  for  its  water  supply  upon  eleven 
thousand  separate  wells,  owned  and  operated  primarily 
in  their  individual  interests  by  thousands  of  enterprising 
individuals,  with  hundreds  of  separate  delivery  systems 
jostling  in  the  highways  that  needed  to  be  kept  clear  for 


30  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

soldiers  and  guns,  its  people  bidding  against  one  another, 
offering  fabulous  prices  for  water,  yet  parched  with  thirst. 

"Basic  industries  and  transportation,"  writes  Dr.  Gar- 
field, in  describing  what  he  saw  as  head  of  the  Fuel  Ad- 
ministration, "were  caught  in  a  vicious  circle.  Steel  could 
not  be  manufactured  without  coke,  coke  could  not  be 
made  without  coal;  coal  could  not  be  commercially  pro- 
duced without  transportation ;  transportation  was  depend- 
ent upon  coal.  .  .  .  Industrially  we  were  in  a  wild  scram- 
ble of  manufacture,  production,  and  shipment.  ...  It 
was  no  longer  a  question  of  withholding  coal  from  non- 
war  industries  but  rather  a  question  whether  any  coal 
could  much  longer  get  through  to  any  consumer." 

With  eleven  thousand  coal  mines  in  operation,  the 
engines  of  the  nation  were  running  cold  for  lack  of  coal. 

Created  to  avert  impending  catastrophe,  the  Fuel  Ad- 
ministration went  about  the  service  of  the  nation  much  as 
an  engineer  would  tackle  the  job  of  converting  eleven 
thousand  wells  into  a  modern  system  of  water  supply.  It 
dealt  with  the  coal  fields  as  a  single  great  reservoir  of 
fuel  and  power.  It  worked  out  a  budget  covering  the 
needs  of  the  essential  industries,  the  railroads,  steel 
plants,  munition  factories,  gas  and  electric  utilities,  as  well 
as  the  domestic  consumers.  It  made  maps  charting  the 
coal-producing  and  coal-consuming  territories,  divided 
the  nation  into  regional  zones,  established  these  zones  as 
fuel  reservoirs,  created  a  distributing  organization  by 
zones  and  states  like  a  great  system  of  water  mains.  It 
called  the  experienced  operators  and  technical  managers 
into  public  service  and  entrusted  to  them  the  technical 
problems  of  production  and  distribution.  It  fixed  prices 
limiting  profits  to  an  estimated  fair  return.  It  converted 
the  miners'  union  and  the  operators'  organizations  into 


COAL  IN  AMERICA  31 

administrative  arms  of  the  government  for  the  industry, 
with  committees  for  conference  and  concihation  at  the 
mines,  and  in  the  various  producing  districts,  heading  up 
in  a  Bureau  of  Labor  at  Washington  as  a  final  court  of 
appeal  for  the  adjustment  of  disputes  over  wages  and 
working  conditions. 

For  the  period  of  the  war,  the  coal  industry  functioned 
as  a  cooperative  public  service.  The  coal  budget,  based 
upon  a  detailed  analysis  of  the  country's  resources  and 
needs,  set  a  definite  standard  of  performance  both  for  the 
industry  and  the  railroads,  and  made  it  possible  for  them 
to  cooperate  intelligently.  The  zones  served  as  tools  for 
the  control  and  direction  of  the  flow  of  coal  called  for  by 
the  budget.  Mr.  C.  E.  Lesher,  Director  of  the  Bureau  of 
Statistics  of  the  Distribution  Division,  writes:  "In  the 
short  period  of  a  few  months  after  the  work  of  the  Fuel 
Administration  was  begun,  it  was  determined  that  the  re- 
quirements of  the  United  States  for  bituminous  coal  in 
the  coal  year  ended  March,  1919,  were  624,000,000  net 
tons,  compared  with  a  production  in  1917  of  552,000,000 
tons  of  bituminous  coal,  and  for  anthracite  100,000,000 
net  tons,  but  slightly  more  than  in  1917.  ...  To  provide 
coal  was  the  problem  of  the  Distribution  Division  of  the 
Fuel  Administration;  to  provide  transportation  was  the 
problem  of  the  Railroad  Administration.  .  .  .  The  adop- 
tion of  the  zoning  system  represented  the  supreme  effort 
of  the  Railroad  Administration  to  overcome  the  transpor- 
tation tangle  in  connection  with  coal.  ...  So  closely  did 
the  officials  of  the  two  administrations  work,  and  so 
effective  were  the  measures  employed,  that  the  results 
surprised  all.  .  .  .  The  Director  of  Operations  of  the 
Railroad  Administration  in  May,  when  production  of 
bituminous  coal  was  averaging  11,500,000  tons  a  week, 


32  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

believed  that  11,800,000  was  the  highest  that  could  be 
expected  in  1918,  as  the  railroads  were  believed  to  have 
reached  their  maximum  capacity.  Within  a  month  rec- 
ords of  12,500,000  tons  a  week  were  reached,  and  in  July, 
and  again  in  September,  the  13,000,000  ton  mark  was 
passed.  .  .  .  When  the  armistice  was  declared,  New 
England,  farthest  from  the  mines,  with  an  average  of 
20  weeks'  supply,  was  literally  gorged  with  soft  coal,  and 
eastern  New  York  and  Pennsylvania,  with  from  6  to  9 
weeks'  stock,  had  abundant  supplies.  .  .  .  From  April  1 
to  July  6,  1918,  rail  shipments  to  New  England  were 
3,058,000  net  tons,  or  98  per  cent  of  the  schedule  of 
3,150,000  tons ;  on  September  28,  shipments  were  6,164,- 
000  tons,  or  105  per  cent  of  the  schedule  for  that  date. 
The  schedule  for  shipments  to  tidewater  from  April  1  to 
July  1  called  for  11,916,000  net  tons.  By  December  21 
shipments  were  9  per  cent  ahead  of  the  program.  The 
Lake  program  called  for  28,000,000  tons  of  cargo  coal ;  a 
total  of  28,153,000  tons  was  supplied.  With  similar 
precision  and  certainty  munition  factories,  arsenals, 
powder  works,  and  by-product  plants  were  kept  run- 
ning, while  stocks  were  accumulated,  insuring  uninter- 
rupted operations  throughout  the  winter.  In  the  same 
manner  retail  dealers  were  given  supplies  for  their  domes- 
tic trade.  Such  results  were  possible  only  because  of 
complete  control  of  shipments  and  the  full  information 
on  which  to  proceed." 

This  was  an  amazing  and  illuminating  demonstration 
of  the  fact  that  our  greatest  national  resource  could  be 
administered  for  the  benefit  of  the  whole  nation.  It  was 
no  longer  a  mere  possibility,  the  thing  had  been  done. 

It  has  been  said  that  this  achievement  was  possible  be- 
cause during  the  war  the  people  had  a  common  object 


COAL  IN  AMERICA  33 

which  so  challenged  their  higher  ideals  that  they  were 
able  to  subordinate  their  individual  and  special  group 
interests  to  the  service  of  the  nation,  to  make  their  con- 
sciousness of  kind  as  a  people  triumphant  over  the  acquisi- 
tive instinct.  Again  it  is  said  that  human  nature  being 
what  it  is,  similar  unselfish  consecration  is  not  to  be 
expected  in  the  sluggish  days  of  peace.  But  if  the  his- 
torical record  teaches  us  anything  it  is  the  essential  false- 
ness of  this  assertion.  That  record  shows  us  the  gradual 
irresistible  spread  of  the  consciousness  of  kind  from  one 
realm  of  human  activity  to  another  as  the  acquisition  of  a 
surplus  makes  this  possible.  It  shows  human  understand- 
ing reaching  out  to  give  all  men  religious  freedom,  to 
assure  them  equal  political  rights;  shows  it  asserting 
human  brotherhood  in  the  right  to  education,  health, 
happiness — and  these  things  not  under  the  stress  of  war, 
but  in  the  conditions  of  peace.  The  possibility  hangs  not 
on  any  technical  inability,  but  on  the  better  prepared- 
ness of  the  minds  of  men,  on  their  clearer  vision,  their 
ability  to  see  the  spiritual  implications  of  their  technical 
triumphs. 


CHAPTER  V 
The  Awakening  of  the  Miners 

With  the  declaration  of  the  armistice  and  the  removal 
of  the  incentive  to  cooperation  in  public  service  which  the 
war  gave,  the  Fuel  Administration  and  its  elaborate 
system  of  statistical  control  of  production  and  distribu- 
tion was  broken  up  as  rapidly  as  it  had  been  organized. 
During  the  war,  there  had  been  gross  examples  of  profit- 
eering just  as  there  had  been  occasional  local  strikes,  but 
by  and  large  the  operators  like  the  miners  had  conducted 
themselves  conscientiously  as  servants  of  the  republic. 
To  a  remarkable  degree  they  subordinated  their  acquisi- 
tive instinct  to  their  consciousness  of  kind  as  citizens  of 
the  nation  whose  life  was  threatened  from  without.  But 
within  a  year  after  the  armistice,  speculative  profiteering 
was  rampant  and  the  coal  industry  was  paralyzed  by  a 
general  strike.  Mr.  Herbert  Hoover,  addressing  the 
American  Institute  of  Mining  and  Metallurgical  Engi- 
neers, described  the  situation  as  a  "national  emergency," 
due  to  the  fact  that  "this  industry,  considered  as  a  whole, 
is  one  of  the  worst  functioning  industries  in  the  United 
States." 

How  shall  we  account  for  this  wide,  swift  swing  of  the 
pendulum  ?  Operators  and  owners  who  had  offered  their 
skill  to  the  government  during  the  national  crisis,  rebelled 
against  all  further  "interference  with  their  private  busi- 
ness." They  rebelled  not  only  against  price  fixing  and  the 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  35 

regulation  of  distribution,  but  even  against  all  attempts  on 
the  part  of  governmental  agencies  to  keep  congress  and 
the  public  informed  of  the  elementary  facts  of  owner- 
ship, costs,  wages,  prices,  and  profits,  without  which  pub- 
lic opinion  is  helplessly  blind.  They  sued  out  an  injunc- 
tion against  the  Federal  Trade  Commission  to  block  its 
efforts  to  search  out  and  publish  these  essential  facts. 
The  unions  also  chafed  under  governmental  restraint 
upon  their  freedom  of  action,  especially  when  the  govern- 
ment lifted  its  limitation  on  prices  and  left  the  consumer 
at  the  mercy  of  an  open  market.  As  prices  and  profits 
mounted,  they  felt  entitled  to  commensurate  wage  in- 
creases. The  war,  they  said,  was  over  though  peace  had 
not  been  formally  declared,  and  they  demanded  release 
from  the  restraints  of  wartime  legislation  so  that  they 
might  freely  exercise  their  economic  pressure  to  secure 
wage  increases  as  the  operators  were  taking  increased 
profits.  For  the  first  time  in  almost  a  generation  they 
laid  down  their  tools,  and  finally  submitted  to  the  arbitra- 
tion of  federal  commissions  only  under  threat  of  an 
injunction  and  the  imprisonment  of  their  leaders.  Eco- 
nomic war  and  group  rivalry  took  the  place  of  coopera- 
tion in  public  service. 

The  main  reason  for  this  violent  reaction  is  probably  to 
be  found  in  the  fact  that  our  modern  democracies,  the 
United  States  in  particular,  were  born  in  rebellion  against 
the  autocratic  authority  of  the  feudal  state,  the  fear  and 
hatred  of  which  still  attaches  even  to  our  representative 
government.  The  memory  of  the  Stuarts  and  Bourbons 
and  Hohenzollerns  is  still  fresh  in  the  modern  democratic 
consciousness,  and  accounts  for  the  maxim  that  the  gov- 
ernment is  best  which  governs  least.  Through  the  revo- 
lutions of  the  eighteenth  century  the  merchants,  manu- 


36  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

facturers,  and  business  men  wrested  from  the  monarch 
his  autocratic  power,  and  it  is  against  this  same  power 
as  exercised  by  the  owners  of  property  that  the  organized 
labor  movement  is  today  in  rebellion.  But  as  against  the 
state  when  it  exercises  such  autocratic  authority  as  during 
the  war  it  exercised  through  the  Fuel  Administration, 
both  groups,  owners  and  workers,  unite.  They  assert  the 
right  of  self-government  within  their  industry.  Like  the 
economists  and  business  men  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
they  contend  that  the  conflict  and  balance  of  their  selfish 
interests  will  by  some  mysterious  provision  of  nature  neu- 
tralize and  resolve  these  selfishnesses  to  the  advantage  of 
the  community.  The  essence  of  this  acquisitive  philoso- 
phy is  expressed  in  the  quaint  nineteenth-century  maxim 
that  "greed  is  held  in  check  by  greed,  and  the  desire  for 
gain  sets  limits  to  itself."  But  this  leaves  the  service  of 
the  community  at  the  mercy  of  a  blind  conflict  of  forces 
within  the  industry,  as  formerly  it  was  at  the  mercy  of 
force  exercised  by  the  monarch  who  was  the  state,  and 
the  public  is  increasingly  dissatisfied  with  the  result.  The 
public  service  conception  of  industry,  and  especially  of 
such  basic  industries  as  coal,  is  rapidly  taking  possession 
of  the  public  mind.  People  are  coming  to  see  that  the 
uncontrolled  conflict  of  forces,  like  autocratic  force  itself, 
is  incompatible  with  the  principle  of  service.  Neither  will 
force  exercised  by  the  state  through  the  courts  solve  the 
difficulty.  Compulsion  is  contrary  to  the  spirit  and  genius 
of  democracy.  The  great  problem  of  our  generation  is  to 
discover  how  industrial  freedom  can  be  reconciled  with 
the  service  of  the  public.  For  an  answer  we  shall  have  to 
look  into  the  spirit  and  structure  of  such  government  as 
our  industries  have  themselves  evolved.  For  democracy 
is  not,  as  its  earlier  critics  declared,  synonymous  with 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  37 

anarchy.  Democracy  is  a  government  of  laws,  not  of 
men;  and  laws  in  a  democracy  are  not  emanations  of 
superior  minds,  but  the  codified  experience  of  the  people. 

As  we  approach  the  problem  of  government  in  our 
basic  industries  as  in  the  nation,  we  discover  two  seem- 
ingly conflicting  tendencies,  two  great  elements  in  our 
population  apparently  pulling  in  opposite  directions.  In 
the  question  of  national  security  and  defence,  the  one 
instinctively  follows  the  ancient  tradition  of  European 
nations,  piling  up  armies  and  navies,  and  striving  to  make 
America  the  most  formidable  military  power  in  the  world ; 
the  second  leans  to  a  policy  of  reconciHation,  striving  by 
conference  and  understandings  with  other  nations  to  pre- 
vent disagreements  and  to  avert  wars.  The  first  makes 
it  a  matter  of  national  honor  to  emphasize  individual 
American  rights  on  land  and  sea,  the  property  rights  of 
Americans,  our  financial  and  economic  interests  in  back- 
ward countries,  and  the  military  force  necessary  to  en- 
force those  interests ;  the  second  aims  to  establish  inter- 
national relations  in  which  such  rights  and  interests  shall 
be  secure  to  all  nations  without  the  constant  threat  of 
force.  To  the  one,  the  world  is  an  arena  in  which  to  fight 
or  starve  is  the  eternal  choice;  to  the  second,  the  world 
is  a  communion  table  at  which  all  men  are  brothers. 

These  same  tendencies,  these  same  manifestations  of 
the  acquisitive  instinct  and  the  consciousness  of  kind, 
appear  in  the  record  of  our  basic  coal  industry.  As  the 
industrial  revolution  got  into  full  swing  in  America,  dur- 
ing and  immediately  following  the  Civil  War,  there  was  a 
rush  for  the  possession  of  the  coal  mines  comparable  to 
the  rush  for  land.  Among  the  men  who  won  possession, 
there  were  some  who  were  keenly  aware  of  the  public 
obligations   of   ownership,   who  in   friendly  cooperation 


38  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

with  their  employes  strove  to  develop  their  properties  in 
the  interest  of  the  public  as  well  as  of  their  employes  and 
themselves.  But  owners  and  miners  alike  took  their  spir- 
itual color  from  their  social  environment  and  in  the  soul 
of  the  people  the  acquisitive  instinct  remained  in  the 
ascendant.  Men  did  not  go  into  business  or  swing  their 
tools  for  their  health.  Their  first  duty,  as  they  saw  it, 
was  to  make  all  the  money  they  could  as  fast  as  they 
could,  and  to  put  themselves  and  those  dependent  upon 
them  on  easy  street.  *'God  helps  them,"  they  said,  "who 
help  themselves."  They  gutted  the  richest  veins  for  quick 
profit,  as  our  forests  and  new  lands  had  been  gutted. 
More  mines  were  opened  than  the  nation  could  possibly 
use.  There  was  a  gluttonous  overdevelopment  of  the 
industry  which  swung  up  and  down  in  high  peaks  and  low 
plunges  of  prosperity  and  depression,  high  prices  and  "no 
market,"  feverish  employment  and  long  stretches  of  inter- 
mittent work,  which  for  hundreds  of  thousands  of  miners 
meant  no  work  at  all,  and  for  many  operators  meant 
bankruptcy.  The  level  of  government  in  the  industry  was 
in  all  essential  respects  the  level  of  hunting  tribes. 

During  the  early  days  of  the  industry,  the  miners,  like 
American  manual  workers  in  general,  were  under  the 
popular  illusion  that  democracy  meant  the  passing  of  a 
permanent  working  class.  With  the  Declaration  of  Inde- 
pendence the  old  social  stratification  of  feudal  Europe 
had  been  wiped  out  forever.  There  was  plenty  of  room 
at  the  top.  Everybody  might  with  perseverance  and  thrift 
get  to  the  top.  This  illusion  took  on  considerable  sub- 
stance from  the  fact  that  when  the  industrial  revolution 
first  invaded  the  coal  fields  America  still  offered  great 
tracts  of  unoccupied  lands  to  satisfy  the  universal  land 
hunger,  whereas  in  England,  for  example,  the  policy  of 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  39 

enclosure  barred  poor  men  from  such  untilled  land  as 
there  was.  This  circumstance  accounts  for  the  slow  and 
erratic  development  of  group  organization  among  Ameri- 
can miners  as  compared  with  the  English.  There  were 
many  cases  like  that  of  the  bituminous  miners  in  Mary- 
land, who  went  into  the  mines ;  took  wages  and  working 
conditions  as  they  found  them;  organized;  fought  for 
better  wages  and  working  conditions ;  accumulated  a  little 
money ;  and  then,  instead  of  using  it  to  build  a  permanent 
organization,  broke  away  for  the  free  lands  of  the  West. 

"Their  ambition  in  life,"  writes  Andrew  Roy,  himself 
at  the  time  a  miner,  "was  to  save  enough  money  to  buy  a 
farm  in  Iowa  or  Wisconsin.  They  would  go  back  to  the 
mines  in  the  autumn  after  harvesting,  work  all  winter, 
and  return  with  their  fresh  stake  in  the  spring.  None  of 
them  ever  returned  permanently  to  the  mines." 

But  as  the  fertile  lands  were  preempted  and  America 
became  increasingly  a  manufacturing  nation,  the  coal 
industry  acquired  a  measure  of  stability  and  drew  into  the 
mining  communities  an  increasing  body  of  men  for  whom 
mining  was  to  be  a  life's  work.  The  condition  of  life  for 
these  permanent  miners  was  largely  determined  by  the 
camps  or  villages  which  the  companies  built  at  the  mines. 
These  were  generally  mean,  cheap,  temporary  affairs. 
For  the  faster  the  miner  works,  the  faster  he  skims  the 
cream,  leaving  the  more  inaccessible  coal  to  waste  where 
it  lies,  the  greater  the  profit,  the  better  the  wages,  and  the 
sooner  the  mine  is  worked  out  and  abandoned.  This,  and 
the  caprice  of  the  market  in  its  effect  upon  the  over- 
expanded  industry,  meant  that  the  miner  must  live  in  his 
knapsack  always  prepared  to  move;  and  it  meant  cheap 
homes  and  a  mean  domestic  equipment,  houses  or  shacks 
that  might  be  abandoned  without  serious  loss.     To  this 


40  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

day  the  great  majority  of  mining  villages  have  the  worst 
characteristics  of  city  slums  intensified  by  the  isolation 
and  loneliness  of  the  country,  once  beautiful,  but  now 
stripped  of  its  forests,  its  streams  running  black  with  the 
sulphurous  waste  of  the  mines.  Such  moderately  attrac- 
tive cities  as  Scranton,  Wilkes-Barre,  and  Hazleton  in  the 
anthracite  region  are  exceptional.  The  mining  towns  that 
sprawl  between  Scranton  and  Wilkes-Barre,  or  that  fol- 
low the  Panther  Creek  Valley,  are  incredibly  hideous 
things.  And  what  is  true  of  the  compact  and  peculiarly 
prosperous  anthracite  region  is  even  more  true  of  the 
sprawling  bituminous  fields. 

The  isolation  and  transitory  character  of  the  mining 
towns  made  the  miners  almost  completely  dependent  upon 
the  owners  of  the  mines  not  only  for  homes  but  also  for 
tools  and  powder ;  all  their  mining,  as  well  as  their  house- 
hold, supplies.  To  this  day  in  the  non-union  fields  of 
West  Virginia  the  operators  finance  and  control,  not  only 
the  stores,  but  the  schools,  the  hospitals,  the  doctors,  the 
churches,  and  the  police.  Independent  merchants  were 
slow  to  invest  their  fortunes  in  such  difficult  ground,  and 
since  the  company  store  was  a  convenient  means  of  sup- 
plementing the  profit  from  the  mines,  independent  mer- 
chants were  not  encouraged  to  compete.  These  conditions 
tended  on  the  one  hand  to  breed  arbitrary  management, — 
autocracy  sometimes  benevolent,  sometimes  tyrannical, — 
and  on  the  other,  restlessness,  discontent,  and  the  spirit 
of  individual  and  organized  revolt.  It  set  the  conscious- 
ness of  kind  in  action  among  the  miners  especially,  and 
resulted  in  innumerable  local  lockouts  and  strikes. 

A  sequence  of  such  local  struggles  occurred  in  the 
Blossburg  district  of  Pennsylvania  in  the  '60's  and  '70's. 
The  Civil  War  created  an  abnormal  demand  for  coal,  and 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  41 

sent  up  the  price  as  well  as  the  cost  of  living  generally. 
In  1863  the  miners  of  the  district  organized  and  suc- 
ceeded in  raising  their  wage  rate  from  thirty-five  cents  to 
a  dollar  and  ten  cents  a  ton.  At  the  end  of  the  war,  the 
market  broke  and  the  coal  fields  were  flooded  with  return- 
ing soldiers.  To  protect  the  standard  of  living  to  which 
during  the  war  they  had  attained,  the  miners  decided  upon 
a  defensive  offensive  and  demanded  a  further  increase  of 
fifteen  cents  a  ton.  The  operators  insisted  upon  the 
liquidation  of  labor.  A  strike  followed.  The  owners 
ordered  the  miners  to  vacate  their  company  houses.  They 
refused.  The  local  courts  issued  writs  of  eviction.  To 
avoid  a  clash  with  the  sheriff  and  his  deputies,  the  miners 
made  a  holiday  in  the  hills,  leaving  their  hearthstones  to 
their  wives.  By  passive  resistance  and  otherwise,  the 
women  held  their  castles.  Then  the  operators  appealed 
to  the  governor  who  sent  in  the  famous  Bucktail  regiment 
just  victoriously  back  from  the  war.  They  put  the  miners, 
their  families,  and  their  household  goods  on  the  street. 
The  strike  was  broken.  Such  miners  as  were  not  de- 
ported or  blacklisted  were  compelled  to  accept  the  terms 
that  were  offered,  including  a  pledge  to  abandon  and  keep 
out  of  their  union.    So  the  pendulum  swung  in  1865. 

In  1873  the  swing  was  reversed.  Most  of  the  mine 
owners  of  Blossburg  were  also  either  bankers  or  retail 
merchants  through  their  company  stores.  They  were  hard 
hit  by  the  panic  of  1873.  Without  consultation  or  warn- 
ing they  announced  an  arbitrary  reduction  in  wages  and 
deferred  payment  of  wages  already  due.  In  November 
they  posted  notices  that  the  miners  might  get  such  goods 
as  they  absolutely  needed  at  the  company  stores,  but  that 
no  wages  would  be  paid  until  the  following  April.  Then 
the  miners  again  drew  together  in  a  union.    The  operators 


42  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

organized  in  opposition.  A  lockout  strike  followed. 
Strike  breakers  were  brought  in,  principally  a  group  of 
recent  Swedish  immigrants,  and  marched  to  a  barracks 
especially  prepared  for  them. 

"The  strikers  gathered  on  the  public  highway  in  front 
of  the  barracks,"  says  Andrew  Roy,  "and  insisted  on  the 
right  to  talk  with  the  strikebreakers  through  one  of  their 
interpreters.  The  managers  declined  to  allow  this  to  be 
done.  But  finally  a  Swedish  miner  got  in  among  them, 
and  within  an  hour,  the  whole  of  the  imported  men 
marched  out  upon  the  highway  and  joined  the  strikers. 
The  strangers  were  formed  into  line,  with  a  Scotch  piper 
at  their  head,  who  marched  them  out  of  town  to  the 
stirring  tune  of  the  McGregors'  Gathering." 

Prevailing  public  opinion  in  the  '70's,  like  the  prevail- 
ing judicial  interpretation  of  the  law,  frowned  upon  con- 
certed action  by  the  workers  as  having  the  nature  of  a 
conspiracy  much  as  the  concerted  action  of  the  common- 
ers in  monarchical  days  was  frowned  upon  as  conspiracy. 
But  curious  sports  of  circumstances  have  occasionally 
arisen  to  modify  opinion  in  one  case  as  in  the  other.  The 
Boston  Tea  Party  is  our  historical  example  in  the  politi- 
cal realm.  In  Blossburg,  before  this  strike  of  1873,  the 
miners  had  been  compelled  to  take  their  pay  in  company 
scrip.  Except  at  the  company  store,  this  scrip  was  worth 
only  from  seventy  to  ninety  cents  on  the  dollar. 

"When  farmers  came  into  mining  towns,"  writes  An- 
drew Roy  out  of  his  own  experience,  "prospective  pur- 
chasers of  their  produce  would  ask  them,  *Will  you  take 
scrip?'  And  if  the  answer  was  in  the  affirmative,  a 
dicker  would  immediately  be  entered  into  as  to  the  amount 
of  discount  to  be  allowed." 

Independent  merchants   had   gradually   ventured   into 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  43 

Blossburg.  To  them  the  scrip  was  a  competitive  injury. 
When  the  operators  Hmited  the  miners  to  credit  at  the 
company  stores,  the  independent  merchants  protested  to 
the  Treasury  Department  of  the  United  States  that  the 
compulsory  circulation  of  company  scrip  was  an  illegal 
infringement  of  a  governmental  function.  The  governor 
of  Pennsylvania  took  alarm  at  this  appeal  over  his  head 
and  sent  the  State  Secretary  of  Internal  Affairs  to  investi- 
gate. He  made  a  report  condemning  the  operators'  prac- 
tice. The  attendant  publicity  scandalized  public  opinion 
and  turned  it  to  the  miners'  side.  This  time  the  strike 
was  won. 

So  by  ebb  and  flow  of  the  consciousness  of  kind,  the 
elements  of  a  governing  structure,  the  balance  of  forces 
between  the  operators  and  the  miners,  gradually  formed 
within  the  industry.  But  in  the  main  the  balance  was 
determined  by  public  opinion ;  and  public  opinion,  like  the 
law,  was  by  inherited  tradition  upon  the  side  of  the 
owners,  the  accepted  custodians  of  property  and  the 
national  wealth.  Episodes  like  the  use  of  company  scrip 
tended  to  even  the  balance.  And  more  important  still  in 
their  effect  upon  the  traditional  hostility  of  public  opinion 
toward  the  unions  in  their  infringement  upon  the  vested 
rights  and  privileges  of  the  owners  were  the  great  mine 
disasters. 

Some  of  our  coal  crops  out  at  the  surface  in  places 
where  through  the  ages  wind  and  weather  have  worn 
away  the  overlying  clay,  stone,  and  slate.  This  can  be 
gathered  like  wood  in  the  forest  without  danger.  The 
amount  of  such  coal  is  commercially  unimportant.  Some 
lies  only  a  few  feet  underground  so  that  it  is  possible  to 
take  it  by  stripping  away  the  thin  overlying  material  and 
blast  and  scoop  it  out  with  a  steam  shovel.     There  are 


44  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

some  stripping  mines  in  the  anthracite  field  and  a  con- 
siderable number  in  the  alluvial  plains  of  the  West.  But 
the  great  bulk  of  our  coal  is  reached  by  driving  drifts  or 
headings  into  the  veins  through  the  sides  of  hills  or  by- 
sinking  shafts  scores,  or  hundreds,  or  thousands  of  feet 
down  through  the  earth  to  where  the  coal  lies.  From  the 
mouth  of  the  drift  or  the  foot  of  the  shaft,  a  tunnel  or 
main  heading  or  gangway  is  driven  on  and  on  into  the  coal 
usually  for  miles,  with  secondary  tunnels  giving  off  the 
main  heading  into  the  pitch-black  rooms  where  the  miners 
work.  In  the  cryptlike  terminal  rooms,  the  miner  with  his 
buddy  undercuts  the  "face"  of  the  coal  with  his  pick  or 
Vv^ith  an  undercutting  machine,  drills  shot-holes  into  the 
face,  sets  his  charge  of  powder  and  tamps  it  in,  and  then 
shoots  the  coal  down.  Sometimes,  for  the  sake  of  speed, 
he  shoots  it  down  without  undercutting,  and  in  the  anthra- 
cite mines  where  the  coal  is  too  hard  for  undercutting, 
direct  shooting  from  the  face  is  the  general  practice. 
This  blasting  of  a  friable  and  inflammable  substance  fills 
the  cellared  air  with  minute  particles  of  highly  explosive 
dust.  As  the  mines  go  deeper  and  further  away  from  the 
opening  they  accumulate  gas  and  underground  water. 
The  greatest  number  of  injuries  and  deaths  in  the  mines, 
and  coal  mining  is  among  the  most  hazardous  of  all  occu- 
pations, result  from  the  falling  of  overhanging  rock  and 
coal ;  but  the  catastrophies  which  have  shocked  public  opin- 
ion into  a  sympathetic  attitude  toward  the  commoners  of 
the  mines  do  not  come  from  this  steady  death  toll  but 
have  resulted  from  explosions  or  fires  that  have  trapped 
and  suffocated  or  burned  their  scores  and  hundreds. 

It  seems  incredible,  in  view  of  the  known  hazards  of 
underground  work,  that  there  should  ever  have  been  oppo- 
sition to  the  installation  of  all  available  safeguards.    But 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  45 

it  must  be  remembered  that  we  are  still  very  close  to 
primitive  man,  that  the  consciousness  of  kind  and  the 
instinct  of  brotherhood  are  still  hard  pressed  by  the  primal 
acquisitive  instinct.  In  America  in  spite  of  potential 
plenty  the  community's  first  preoccupation  was  escape 
from  hunger,  the  winning  of  individual  and  national 
economic  security.  The  prevailing  attitude  toward  death 
and  injury  in  the  mines  was,  and  to  a  great  extent  still  is, 
much  the  same  as  the  prevailing  attitude  toward  death 
and  injury  in  battle.  In  ordinary  days  of  peace  we  do  not 
glorify  the  soldier.  Similarly,  it  is  only  at  time  of  disaster 
that  our  sympathetic  understanding  goes  out  to  the  shock 
troops  in  our  war  against  nature,  the  men  who  with  pick 
and  powder  win  coal  underground. 

"So  numerous  and  heartrending,"  says  Roy,  "had  these 
accidents  become  (in  the  anthracite  field)  that  the  miners 
of  Schuylkill  county  in  the  year  1858  appealed  to  the 
legislature  for  the  passage  of  a  law  to  provide  for  official 
supervision  of  the  mines,  and  a  bill  for  the  purpose  was 
introduced  the  same  year;  but  it  found  no  countenance, 
and  never  came  to  a  vote.  In  1866  it  was  again  intro- 
duced, and  passed  the  lower  house,  but  it  was  defeated  in 
the  Senate.  In  1869  it  was  reintroduced,  passed  both 
houses  and  received  the  approval  of  the  governor  of  the 
state.  It  provided  for  one  mine  inspector  for  Schuylkill 
county,  the  other  counties  being  left  out.  The  law  had 
been  in  operation  only  a  few  months  when  the  Avondale 
shaft  in  the  adjoining  county  of  Luzerne  took  fire  and 
suffocated  every  soul  in  the  mine  including  two  daring 
miners  who  went  down  the  mine  after  the  fire,  in  the 
hope  of  rescuing  some  of  the  entombed  men.  The  shaft 
had  but  one  opening.  .  .  .  The  whole  underground  force 
of  the  mine,  109  souls,  were  suffocated  to  death  by  the 


46  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

gases  emanating  from  the  burning  woodwork  in  the  shaft 
and  the  breakers  on  top  of  it.  .  .  .  No  catastrophe  ever 
occurred  in  this  country  which  created  a  greater  sensa- 
tion than  this  mining  horror.  The  public  press  united  in 
demanding  the  passage  of  all  laws  necessary  for  the  pro- 
tection of  the  health  and  lives  of  the  miners.  .  .  .  When 
the  legislature  met  in  the  following  January  a  committee 
of  representative  miners  was  sent  to  Harrisburg  to  have 
a  mining  bill  enacted  into  law  for  the  proper  security  of 
the  lives,  health,  and  safety  of  the  anthracite  miners  of 
Pennsylvania,  which  was  promptly  done." 

Stirred  by  the  Avondale  disaster,  the  miners  of  the 
Mahoning  Valley  in  Ohio  had  a  bill  introduced  into  the 
Ohio  legislature  calling  for  two  separate  openings  in  all 
mines  employing  more  than  ten  men  underground,  for  the 
forced  circulation  to  the  face  of  the  coal  of  at  least  one 
hundred  cubic  feet  of  air  per  minute  for  each  underground 
worker,  the  daily  inspection  of  all  gaseous  mines  by  a  fire- 
viewer  before  the  miners  were  allowed  to  enter,  the 
appointment  of  four  state  mine  inspectors,  and  the  right 
of  the  miners  to  appoint  a  check-weighman  at  their  own 
expense  to  see  that  their  coal  was  fairly  weighed  at  the 
tipple.  As  soon  as  the  bill  was  printed,  a  committee  of 
thirteen  operators  representing  every  mining  district  in 
the  state,  supported  by  legal  counsel  and  the  state  geolo- 
gist, appeared  in  opposition.  Their  contention  was  that 
the  miners  of  the  state  did  not  want  the  law,  that  the  bill 
was  the  invention  of  professional  demagogues  and  labor 
agitators  who  sponged  a  fat  living  off  the  ignorance  and 
cupidity  of  their  misguided  followers,  that  there  was 
neither  gas  nor  bad  air  in  Ohio  mines,  that  the  lives  and 
fortunes  of  the  miners  were  safe  in  the  hands  of  their 
employers,  that  the  bill  was  special  legislation  and  uncon- 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  A7 

stitutional  and  that  if  enacted  by  the  General  Assembly  of 
Ohio  it  would  be  set  aside  by  the  Supreme  Court.  The 
bill  was  defeated,  but  a  commission  of  inquiry  was  ap- 
pointed. At  the  next  session  of  the  General  Assembly  the 
miners'  bill  was  reintroduced  and  passed  by  a  unanimous 
vote.  But  before  it  was  sent  to  the  governor,  the  opera- 
tors again  sent  a  committee  to  defeat  it.  It  was  amended 
and  all  provision  for  state  inspection  of  the  mines  stricken 
out.  In  the  following  June  a  disaster  occurred  in  a  mine 
in  Portage  county  owned  by  the  member  of  the  legisla- 
ture who  had  emasculated  the  bill.  This  mine,  too,  had 
but  one  opening  which  an  accidental  fire  converted  into  a 
furnace.  There  were  twenty-one  men  in  the  mine.  Ten 
were  burned  to  death  and  the  eleven  who  managed  to 
escape  through  the  smoke  and  flame  were  terribly  injured. 
The  miners'  bill  was  reintroduced  and  again  opposed. 
Judge  Hoadly,  afterwards  governor  of  Ohio,  speaking  in 
opposition  very  accurately  expressed  the  prevailing  state 
of  mind.  "We  have  tried  to  make  men  sober  and  moral 
by  law,"  he  said,  "and  now  we  are  going  to  try  to  sur- 
round them  with  protection  against  carelessness  and 
danger,  and  enable  them  to  shut  their  eyes  and  walk  in 
darkness,  satisfied  with  the  care  and  protection  of  the 
state.  I  admit  that  there  is  a  line  to  which  the  right  of 
the  legislature — the  duty  of  the  legislature — may  go 
without  infringing  on  the  natural  right  of  the  citizen;  but 
what  I  want  to  suggest  as  the  safe  side,  is  to  leave  the  peo- 
ple free,  and  to  allow  mishap  and  disaster  to  have  its 
natural  efifect  as  the  penalty  for  and  the  cure  of  the  evils 
which  result  from  negligence  which  causes  mishap  and 
disaster."  But  in  spite  of  this  persuasive  reasoning,  the 
miners'  bill,  after  years  of  effort,  was  finally  enacted  into 
law. 


48  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

Thus  slowly  the  consciousness  of  kind  worked  through 
the  public  to  the  miners,  under  the  influence  of  such 
understanding  as  mining  catastrophies  shocked  into  the 
public  mind.  But  the  main  force  that  made  for  the  im- 
provement of  their  conditions  of  work,  for  the  develop- 
ment of  standards  of  living  among  them  and  of  orderly 
processes  of  government  within  the  industry  as  a  whole 
was  the  operation  of  the  consciousness  of  kind  within 
their  own  group. 

The  processes  of  civilization  like  all  cosmic  processes 
are  slow.  The  period  of  recorded  history  is  but  a  minute 
in  the  unnumbered  years  of  man's  life  upon  earth.  It 
was  by  slow  stages  that  the  blind  herd  instinct  which 
sends  wolves  hunting  in  packs  and  leads  birds  to  migrate 
in  flocks  merged  into  the  consciousness  of  kind  and  the 
spirit  of  service  among  men.  So  in  the  coal  industry,  the 
miners  organized  slowly,  first  in  local  groups,  then  by 
districts,  then  on  a  national  scale  with  the  beginnings  of 
international  affiliations.  They  drew  together  into  unions, 
broke  apart,  drew  together  again.  As  they  acquired 
strength,  their  interests  came  into  conflict  with  the  inter- 
ests of  the  coal  owners.  There  were  strikes  and  lockouts, 
local  joint  agreements,  then  strikes  and  lockouts  again, 
then  other  agreements  for  arbitration  and  conciliation, 
then  more  strikes  and  lockouts.  That  process  still  goes 
on  as  in  the  bitter  civil  war  in  West  Virginia.  But  in  the 
main  it  reached  a  culmination  so  far  as  the  coal  industry 
is  concerned  when  in  1902  President  Roosevelt  inter- 
vened in  the  interests  of  the  consumers,  asserted  a  balance 
of  power  between  and  over  the  two  groups,  and  estab- 
lished the  foundations  of  orderly  government  within  the 
industry.  The  processes  by  which  representative  govern- 
ment has  grown  up  within  the  industry  run  closely  parallel 


THE  AWAKENING  OF  THE  MINERS  49 

with  the  processes  by  which  the  parliamentary  govern- 
ment arose  in  the  European  poHtical  states,  with  property 
owners  performing  the  very  important  function  of  techni- 
cal organization  and  development  which  in  the  early 
stages  of  national  life  the  monarch  and  his  executives 
performed,  and  the  miners  playing  the  role  of  the  com- 
m.oners.  It  is  upon  this  historical  structure  that  the 
future  of  the  industry  as  a  public  service  depends. 


CHAPTER  VI 
The  Struggle  for  Organization 

In  their  volume  on  The  Church  and  Industrial  Re- 
construction, the  Committee  on  the  War  and  the  Reli- 
gious Outlook,  an  interdenominational  group  appointed 
by  the  joint  action  of  the  Federal  Council  of  Churches 
and  the  General  Wartime  Commission  of  the  Churches, 
declare  that  "Democracy  is  the  attempt  to  realize  this 
fundamental  right  of  every  personality  to  self-expression 
through  cooperation  with  others  in  a  common  task.  In 
the  political  sphere  it  has  already  found  large  recogni- 
tion. ...  It  applies,  or  should  apply,  in  the  sphere  of 
organized  religion,  which  is  the  Church.  It  applies  in 
the  sphere  of  industry.  Indeed,  it  may  be  of  relatively 
small  significance  for  men  to  have  the  right  of  political 
self-expression,  unless  they  have  similar  opportunity  for 
self-expression  in  their  daily  work.  For  the  conditions 
which  affect  them  in  industry  touch  them  more  closely 
than  the  concerns  of  the  state." 

It  is  for  this  reason  that  the  study  of  the  growth  of 
democratic  organization  and  government  in  industry  in- 
evitably stresses  the  growth  of  organization  and  orderly 
processes  among  the  workers,  the  commoners  of  indus- 
try. The  political  revolution  of  the  eighteenth  century 
emancipated  the  owners  of  property  from  the  autocratic 
control  of  the  monarchical  state.  But,  as  Sidney  and 
Beatrice  Webb  have  pointed  out,  "the  framers  of  the 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  51 

United  States  Constitution,  like  the  various  parties  in 
the  French  Revolution  of  1789,  saw  no  resemblance  or 
analogy  between  the  personal  power  which  they  drove 
from  the  castle,  the  altar,  and  the  throne,  and  that  which 
they  left  unchecked  in  the  farm,  the  factory,  and  the  mine. 
Even  at  the  present  day,  after  a  century  of  revolution,  the 
great  mass  of  middle-  and  upper-class  'Liberals'  all  over 
the  world  see  no  more  inconsistency  between  democracy 
and  unrestrained  capitalist  enterprise,  than  Washington 
and  Jefferson  did  between  democracy  and  slave-owning. 
The  'dim,  inarticulate'  multitude  of  manual- working 
wage-earners  have,  from  the  outset,  felt  their  way  to  a 
different  view.  To  them,  the  uncontrolled  power  wielded 
by  the  owners  of  the  means  of  production,  able  to  with- 
hold from  the  manual  worker  all  chance  of  subsistence 
unless  he  accepted  their  terms,  meant  a  far  more  genuine 
loss  of  liberty,  and  a  far  keener  sense  of  personal  sub- 
jection, than  the  official  jurisdiction  of  the  magistrate,  or 
the  far-off,  impalpable  rule  of  the  king.  The  captains  of 
industry,  like  the  kings  of  yore,  are  honestly  unable  to 
understand  why  their  personal  power  should  be  interfered 
with.  .  .  .  The  agitation  for  freedom  of  combination  and 
factory  legislation  has  been,  in  reality,  a  demand  for  a 
'constitution'  in  the  industrial  realm." 

What  the  Committee  on  the  War  and  the  Religious 
Outlook  and  the  Webbs  state  in  slightly  different  language 
explains  why  the  history  of  constitutional  government  in 
industry  is  fundamentally  the  history  of  the  rise  of  the 
workers  through  their  unions  and  collective  bargaining 
toward  a  democratic  equality  of  status  with  their 
employers. 

As  soon  as  the  mining  communities  became  sufficiently 
stable  to  allow  the  consciousness  of  kind  to  operate,  the 


52  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

miners  began  to  organize  into  small  local  groups  for 
mutual  aid,  to  care  for  one  another  in  sickness,  to  bury 
one  another  at  death,  and  to  improve  their  wages  and 
working  conditions.  But  it  was  not  until  after  the  indus- 
trial revolution  got  under  full  headway  during  and  imme- 
diately after  the  Civil  War  that  they  became  actively  con- 
scious of  a  community  of  interest  over  wide  areas.  For 
the  structure  of  modern  democratic  government  in  indus- 
try as  in  nations  and  among  nations,  depends  upon  rail- 
roads, the  postal  and  telegraph  service,  and  other  means 
of  communication.  A  strong  impetus  and  a  definite  direc- 
tion was  given  to  the  existing  tendency  toward  organiza- 
tion by  the  steady  infiltration  of  miners  from  Great 
Britain  where  constitutional  government  in  the  coal  indus- 
try had  already  made  considerable  progress  and  where  the 
miners  were  firmly  organized.  The  miners  held  their 
first  national  convention  in  St.  Louis,  Missouri,  in  Janu- 
ary, 1861.  The  call  had  been  issued  by  Daniel  Weaver, 
an  English  trade-unionist,  who  after  the  failure  of  the 
Chartist  movement  had  settled  in  the  coal  fields  of  Illinois. 
"The  necessity  of  an  association  of  miners  and  of  those 
branches  of  industry  immediately  connected  with  mining 
operations,  having  for  its  object  the  physical,  mental,  and 
social  elevation  of  the  miner,  has  long  been  felt  by  the 
thinking  portion  of  the  miners  generally,"  said  Weaver  in 
his  call.  "Union  is  the  great  fundamental  principle  by 
which  every  object  of  importance  is  to  be  accomplished. 
Man  is  a  social  being  and  if  left  to  himself  in  an  isolated 
condition  is  one  of  the  weakest  of  creatures,  but  when 
associated  with  his  kind  he  works  wonders.  .  .  .  There 
is  an  electric  sympathy  kindled,  the  attractive  forces  in- 
herent in  human  nature  are  called  into  action  and  a  stream 
of  generous  emotion  binds  together  and  animates  the 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  53 

whole.  .  .  .  Our  unity  is  essential  to  the  attainment  of 
our  rights  and  the  amelioration  of  our  present  condi- 
tion. .  .  .  Our  safety,  our  remedy,  our  protection,  our 
dearest  interests,  and  the  social  well-being  of  our  families, 
present  and  future,  depend  upon  our  unity,  our  duty,  and 
our  regard  for  each  other." 

The  convention  formed  the  American  Miners'  Associa- 
tion, elected  Weaver  secretary  and  Thomas  Lloyd,  an- 
other English  immigrant,  president.  A  considerable  num- 
ber of  miners  in  Illinois,  Indiana,  Ohio,  Pennsylvania, 
and  Maryland  joined  the  union,  which  exerted  a  mild 
influence  upon  the  legislatures  of  the  several  states.  But 
the  Association  was  a  national  organization  in  name  only. 
The  miners  had  not  yet  learned  to  work  together  under 
the  direction  of  their  own  leaders.  The  organization  was 
not  strong  enough  to  withstand  the  break  in  the  labor 
market  and  the  anti-union  drive  that  attended  the  flood 
of  returning  soldiers  at  the  end  of  the  Civil  War.  More- 
over, the  American  public  regarded  the  trade  union  as  an 
alien  institution,  the  evil  creation  of  "foreigners"  and 
alien  "agitators."  It  was  held  to  be  contrary  to  the 
genius  of  American  life  that  workers  should  combine  to 
interfere  with  the  sanctity  of  property  and  the  preroga- 
tives that  inhered  in  that  sanctity  just  as  it  had  been  so 
held  in  England  a  century  before.  Even  by  the  great 
majority  of  wage  workers  as  by  the  public  at  large  the 
accepted  theory,  carried  over  from  the  feudal  tradition 
of  Europe,  was  that  the  rights  and  interests  of  both  would 
be  best  protected  and  cared  for  "by  the  Christian  men  to 
whom  God  has  given  control  of  the  property  interests  of 
the  country." 

Under  stress  of  the  panic  of  1873,  and  after  a  series  of 
unsuccessful   strikes  to  maintain   wages,  the  American 


54  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

Miners'  Association  went  to  pieces.  But  local  unions, 
generally  known  as  "Miners'  and  Laborers'  Benevolent 
Associations,"  kept  up  a  struggling  existence.  The 
strongest  of  these  was  the  Workingmen's  Benevolent 
Association,  a  consolidation  of  all  the  local  unions  in  the 
anthracite  field.  It  was  largely  the  creation  of  John 
Siney,  an  Englishbred  Irishman,  among  the  keenest  minds 
the  labor  movement  has  produced.  One  of  the  first  acts 
of  this  Benevolent  Association  was  to  declare  a  suspen- 
sion of  work  in  order  to  relieve  the  mines  of  the  glut  of 
coal  which  had  resulted  from  the  slack  industrial  period 
following  the  Civil  War.  This  maneuver  met  with  con- 
demnation of  the  press  and  from  the  operators,  who  did 
not,  nevertheless,  regard  it  with  entire  disfavor,  since 
it  had  a  considerable  efifect  in  maintaining  prices  as  well 
as  wages.  As  soon  as  the  suspension  had  accomplished  its 
purpose  the  miners  returned  to  work,  and  immediately 
thereafter  John  Siney  succeeded  in  persuading  the  anthra- 
cite owners  to  enter  a  conference  with  representatives  of 
the  union.  The  first  joint  meeting  of  operators  and 
miners  was  held  in  Scranton  in  1869,  and  as  a  result  of 
this  conference  the  first  joint  agreement  ever  made  be- 
tween American  miners  and  operators  for  the  establish- 
ment of  a  wage  scale  was  signed  on  July  29,  1870,  by 
five  members  of  the  Anthracite  Board  of  Trade  and  five 
representatives  of  the  Workingmen's  Benevolent  Asso- 
ciation. 

This  unique  achievement  made  Siney  a  national  figure. 
Local  leaders  in  all  parts  of  the  country  appealed  to  him 
to  call  another  national  convention.  On  his  initiative,  the 
Miners'  National  Association  was  constituted  by  the  con- 
vention held  in  Youngstown,  Ohio,  in  October,  1873.  The 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  55 

convention  elected  Siney  president.     National  headquar- 
ters were  opened  in  Cleveland. 

Wearied  with  endless  strikes  the  convention  had  made 
arbitration,  conciliation,  and  cooperation  the  basic  prin- 
ciples of  their  constitution.  Fortified  with  these  princi- 
ples, Siney  and  an  associate  visited  the  offices  of  all  the 
coal  companies  in  Cleveland.  All  except  one  of  the  opera- 
tors turned  them  down.  They  would  have  nothing  to  do 
with  a  union.  The  exception  was  Marcus  A.  Hanna. 
When  Siney  assured  Hanna  that  no  strike  would  be  called 
without  previous  resort  to  arbitration  and  that  the  officers 
of  the  union  would  order  the  men  to  keep  at  work  even  if 
an  award  went  against  them,  Hanna  accepted  their  propo- 
sition and  undertook  to  bring  the  other  operators  into 
line.  In  spite  of  the  widespread  depression  in  the  coal 
trade  the  National  Association  grew  rapidly.  Twenty- 
one  thousand  members  were  represented  at  the  second 
convention  held  in  Cleveland  in  October,  1874.  But  not- 
withstanding Hanna's  great  influence,  many  of  the  opera- 
tors remained  hostile  to  the  union.  Toward  the  close  of 
1874,  the  operators  of  the  Tuscarawas  Valley  in  Ohio 
announced  a  wage  cut  from  ninety  to  seventy  cents  a  ton. 
The  miners  determined  to  strike.  Siney  induced  them 
to  resort  to  arbitration.  The  umpire  admitted  a  reduction 
to  seventy-one  cents.  The  miners  were  bitter  against  the 
decision  which  had  gone  almost  completely  against  them. 
Only  the  great  influence  of  Siney  restrained  them  from 
striking  at  once. 

Then  one  of  the  operators,  the  Crawford  Coal  Com- 
pany, took  advantage  of  the  discontent.  This  company 
had  refused  to  join  Hanna  and  his  associates  in  deahng 
with  the  union.  During  the  arbitration  proceedings,  the 
Crawford  Company  locked  out  their  men  for  demanding 


56  THE  COMING  OF  COAL  | 

a  check-weighman,  and  appealed  to  the  operators'  associa- 
tion for  support.  The  associated  operators  refused.  The 
Crawford  Company  then  offered  their  locked-out  men  an 
advance  of  nine  cents  a  ton  above  the  rate  fixed  for  the 
union  miners  by  the  arbitration  award.  The  acquisitive 
instinct  was  stronger  than  the  consciousness  of  kind 
among  the  non-union  miners.  They  accepted  and  went 
back  to  work. 

This  turn  of  the  wheel  broke  Siney's  control  over  the 
organization.  His  followers  threatened  to  desert  unless 
he  repudiated  the  arbitration  award.  He  refused.  But 
his  executive  board,  in  a  desperate  effort  to  save  the 
union,  overruled  him  and  yielded.  Strikes  and  lockouts 
followed  in  quick  succession.  Hanna  was  as  helpless  as 
Siney.  Strike  breakers  were  imported,  under  cover  men 
and  troops  were  brought  in.  Arbitration,  constitutional 
government,  and  the  union  went  on  the  rocks. 

Similar  misfortune  attended  Siney's  pioneer  efforts  to 
establish  the  union  and  constitutional  government  in  his 
home  district  at  Clearfield,  Pennsylvania.  No  sooner  had 
the  miners  joined  the  National  Association  than  they 
expected  Siney  and  his  fellow  executives  to  achieve  quick 
redress  of  their  grievances  and  to  force  an  advance  in 
wages.  They  grew  impatient  with  the  slow  processes  of 
negotiation.  They  struck  against  the  advice  of  Siney. 
Immediately  the  operators  in  the  Clearfield  district  fol- 
lowed the  precedent  of  Tuscarawas.  They  brought  in 
strike  breakers  and  troops.  A  brief  civil  war  followed. 
Some  heads  were  broken.  The  strike  was  lost.  In  spite 
of  his  heroic  efforts  to  keep  the  peace  and  to  establish 
orderly  processes  of  government,  Siney  was  arrested  for 
conspiracy   and  thrown  into   jail.     The  morale  of   the 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  57 

Miners'  National  Association  was  broken,  and  like  its 
predecessors  it  went  by  the  board. 

Like  the  tides  of  the  sea,  the  consciousness  of  kind 
ebbed  and  flowed  among  the  miners.  They  drew  together 
into  local,  state,  and  national  organizations,  held  for  brief 
periods,  and  then  scattered  again  under  the  impact  of  the 
operators  supported  by  prevailing  public  opinion.  They 
had  not  become  fully  group  conscious;  neither  had  the 
public  come  to  recognize  their  unions  as  essential  arms  of 
constitutional  government  within  the  industry. 

In  the  bounteous  days  of  national  expansion,  in  the 
exuberant  '70's  and  '80's,  a  vague  belief  was  abroad  that 
America  would  never  develop  a  permanent  working  class. 
Every  man  was  "as  good  as"  another,  and  the  hustling, 
self-made  business  man  was  the  American  ideal.  In 
accord  with  this  theory  was  one  of  the  significant  actions 
of  the  Miners'  National  Association,  an  attempt  to  buy 
coal  lands  to  be  operated  by  the  miners,  not  as  a  workers' 
cooperative  association,  but  as  a  corporation  of  business 
men.  During  the  '70's  and  the  '80's  also  the  Knights  of 
Labor  built  up  a  great  following  among  the  wage-work- 
ers, largely  on  the  philosophy  that  if  they  kept  free  of 
"class-conscious"  trade  unions  and  went  in  for  a  mass 
movement  of  all  workers,  they  could  by  some  strange 
alchemy  of  the  American  spirit  rise  to  the  status  of  inde- 
pendent business  men.  The  Knights  of  Labor  played 
much  the  same  role  among  the  wage-workers  that  the 
various  "populist"  movements  played  among  the  farmers 
before  the  development  of  such  group-conscious  tenden- 
cies as  those  which  in  our  day  have  developed  the 
farmers'  cooperative  societies  and  the  agricultural  bloc. 

The  labor  movement  as  we  know  it  today  in  America 
began  when  in  1886  Samuel  Gompers  became  first  presi- 


58  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

dent  of  the  American  Federation  of  Labor,  an  office 
which  with  the  interruption  of  a  single  year  he  has  held 
ever  since.  Mr.  Gompers  led  the  wage- workers  to  a 
frank  acceptance  of  the  prevailing  business  and  acquisi- 
tive ideals  as  the  basis,  not  of  individual  escape  from  the 
working  class,  but  of  their  consolidation  into  trade 
unions  for  the  businesslike  control  and  sale  of  their  craft 
skill  through  collective  bargaining.  It  is  significant  that 
the  immediate  precursor  of  the  American  Federation  of 
Labor — the  Organized  Trades  Unions  of  the  United 
States  of  America  and  Canada,  over  whose  councils  Mr. 
Gompers  exercised  great  influence — demanded  the  legal 
incorporation  of  trade  unions  and  a  protective  tariff  for 
American  labor,  as  well  as  the  prohibition  of  child  labor 
under  fourteen,  the  eight-hour  day,  the  abolition  of  con- 
spiracy laws,  and  the  other  reforms  which  constitute  the 
present  program  of  organized  labor.  By  the  frank  recog- 
nition of  the  basic  force  of  the  acquisitive  instinct  in 
human  nature,  the  realistic  leaders  of  the  new  labor 
movement  were  able  to  release  and  consolidate  the  con- 
sciousness of  kind  for  effective  operation  within  the 
wage-working  group. 

The  influence  of  this  new  philosophy  made  itself  felt 
throughout  all  the  skilled  trades  and  notably  among  the 
miners.  After  the  break-up  of  the  Miners'  National  Asso- 
ciation, the  miners  maintained  state  organizations  in 
Ohio,  Illinois,  Pennsylvania,  and  in  several  other  states. 
They  steadily  took  the  initiative  in  seeking  conferences 
and  negotiations  with  the  operators  of  their  districts.  In 
spite  of  the  failure  of  arbitration  under  the  pioneering 
leadership  of  Siney,  they  supported  the  agitation  which 
resulted  in  the  Trade  Tribunal  Act  of  Pennsylvania 
(1883),  and  the  similar  arbitration  act  of  Ohio  (1885). 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  59 

But  the  process  of  overdevelopment  which  has  always 
characterized  the  American  coal  industry  created  sharp 
fluctuations  of  prosperity  and  market  depression  and 
afforded  an  unstable  basis  for  the  establishment  of  the 
machinery  of  orderly  government.  Both  miners  and 
operators  showed  a  tendency  to  run  wild.  Conferences 
were  held,  arbitration  agreements  occasionally  entered 
into,  but  now  one  side,  now  the  other,  repudiated  the 
awards  as  the  fluctuating  market  sent  prices  erratically  up 
and  down.  The  needs  of  the  community  have  always 
called  for  the  integration  of  the  industry,  but  the  happy- 
go-lucky  American  spirit  persistently  shied  away  from 
public  regulation  as  long  as  the  acquisitive  instinct  could 
be  satisfied  at  however  great  a  cost  in  profligate  use  and 
waste.  But  this  very  overdevelopment,  with  its  destruc- 
tive effect  upon  wages  and  regularity  of  employment, 
continually  brought  the  miners  back  to  a  consciousness 
of  the  need  for  national  organization. 

In  1885,  John  McBride,  president  of  the  Ohio  Miners' 
State  Union,  and  later,  for  a  single  term,  president  of  the 
American  Federation  of  Labor,  issued  a  call  to  the  miners 
of  the  United  States  to  meet  in  convention  on  the  ninth  of 
September  in  Indianapolis.  Seven  states  sent  delegates. 
The  National  Federation  of  Miners  and  Mine  Laborers 
was  formed  and  its  Executive  Board  issued  a  call  to  the 
mine  operators  of  the  United  States  and  territories 
inviting  them  to  a  joint  meeting  for  the  purpose  of  ad- 
justing market  and  mining  prices  in  such  a  way  as  to 
avoid  strikes  and  lockouts,  and  to  give  to  each  party  an 
increased  profit  from  the  sale  of  coal.  Only  one  operator, 
Mr.  W.  P.  Rend  of  Chicago,  paid  any  attention  to  this 
call.  He  inspired  the  miners  to  persevere.  They  sent  out 
a  second  invitation.    A  dozen  or  so  operators  met  with  the 


60  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

executive  board  in  Chicago  and  agreed  upon  a  joint  call 
for  a  national  joint  convention  to  be  held  in  Pittsburgh 
in  December. 

"The  undersigned  committee,"  the  invitation  said,  "con- 
sisting of  three  mine  owners,  and  three  delegates  repre- 
senting the  miners'  organization,  were  appointed  to  make 
a  general  public  presentation  of  the  objects  and  purposes 
of  this  convention,  and  to  extend  an  invitation  to  all  those 
engaged  in  coal  mining  in  America,  to  lend  their  active 
cooperation  toward  the  establishment  of  harmony  and 
friendship  between  capital  and  labor  in  this  large  and 
important  industry.  .  .  .  Apart  and  in  conflict  capital  and 
labor  become  agents  of  evil,  while  united  they  create 
blessings  of  plenty  and  prosperity.  .  .  .  Capital  repre- 
sents the  accumulation,  or  savings,  of  past  labor,  while 
labor  is  the  most  sacred  part  of  capital.  ...  It  is  evident 
that  the  general  standard  of  reward  for  labor  has  sunk 
too  low.  ...  It  is  equally  true  that  the  wide-spread  de- 
pression of  business,  the  overproduction  of  coal,  and  the 
consequent  severe  competition  have  caused  the  capital 
invested  in  mines  to  yield  little  or  no  profitable  returns. 
The  constant  reductions  of  wages  that  have  lately  taken 
place  have  afforded  no  relief  to  capital,  and,  indeed,  have 
tended  to  increase  its  embarrassments.  .  .  .  This  is  the 
first  movement  of  a  national  character  in  America,  taken 
with  the  intention  of  the  establishment  of  labor  con- 
ciliation. .  .  ." 

In  response  to  this  call  a  small  joint  meeting  was  held 
in  Pittsburgh  in  December.  It  adjourned  for  a  second 
conference  in  Columbus,  Ohio,  in  February,  1886.  Here 
the  operators  were  represented  by  seventy-seven  delegates, 
principally  from  Ohio,  but  also  from  Pennsylvania, 
Indiana,  Illinois,  Maryland,  and  West  Virginia.     They 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  61 

adopted  a  national  wage  scale,  established  a  national 
board  of  arbitration,  and  provided  for  the  creation  of 
similar  state  boards  to  maintain  industrial  peace  and  to 
develop  the  structure  and  processes  of  constitutional 
government. 

The  agreement  held  and  worked  in  spite  of  the  opposi- 
tion of  groups  of  operators,  notably  in  the  West  Virginia 
field  and  the  steel  district  of  Pittsburgh,  and  the  individ- 
ualistic lethargy  of  many  of  the  miners.  The  new  philoso- 
phy of  business  trade  unionism  gripped  the  miners,  made 
the  trade  union  policy  triumphant  over  the  vaguely  Uto- 
pian policy  of  the  Knights  of  Labor,  and  resulted  in  the 
consolidation  of  the  miners'  organizations  into  the  United 
Mine  Workers  of  America  in  1890.  But  the  process  of 
overdevelopment  continued  in  the  industry.  The  work- 
ings of  the  joint  machinery  creaked  and  faltered  under 
the  impact  of  strikes  and  lockouts  due  in  the  main  to 
market  fluctuations,  and  for  a  decade  the  United  Mine 
Workers,  in  spite  of  periods  of  prosperity  and  rapid 
growth,  was  perpetually  threatened  with  the  fate  of  its 
predecessors. 

This  fate  was  averted  by  the  economic  developments 
which  had  converted  the  compact  anthracite  field  into  a 
virtual  monopoly  under  the  combined  control  of  the 
anthracite  railroads  and  the  great  banking  houses  of  the 
East  that  owned  the  railroads.  While  the  bituminous 
industry  sprawled  and  overdeveloped,  the  anthracite  com- 
bination gradually  restricted  the  production  of  anthracite 
to  the  calculable  demand  of  the  market.  This  made  for 
stability  in  the  anthracite  field,  which  is  reflected  in  the 
fact  that  while  even  today  the  average  working  year  in 
the  bituminous  fields  is  approximately  two  hundred  and 
fifteen  days, — an  average  working  day  when  spread  over 


62  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

the  year,  of  less  than  four  hours, — the  working  year  in  the 
anthracite  field  gradually  rose  until  today  it  holds  steady 
at  something  more  than  two  hundred  and  sixty  days  a 
year. 

This  stability  enabled  the  anthracite  miners  to  accumu- 
late an  economic  surplus  above  their  immediate  needs  and 
set  the  consciousness  of  kind  in  vigorous  operation  among 
them.  By  1900  they  had  developed  the  nucleus  of  a 
strong  organization.  Their  wages,  however,  had  lagged 
behind  the  wages  of  the  miners  in  the  better-organized 
bituminous  fields.  On  their  demand,  the  national  officers 
of  the  United  Mine  Workers  called  a  convention  of 
anthracite  representatives  in  Hazleton,  Pennsylvania,  "to 
devise  means  by  which  a  joint  convention  of  operators 
and  miners  can  be  held"  to  consider  the  upward  readjust- 
ment of  the  anthracite  wage  scale  and  "methods  to  aboHsh 
the  pernicious  system  now  in  vogue  in  the  anthracite 
region  by  which  a  part  of  the  earnings  of  the  mine  work- 
ers is  taken  from  them  by  the  infamous  system  of  dock- 
age, and  by  the  practice  of  compelling  mine  workers  to 
load  more  than  2240  pounds  for  a  ton."  The  operators 
disregarded  the  convention's  invitation  to  a  joint  con- 
ference. The  men  struck.  The  operators  made  conces- 
sions but  refused  to  deal  with  the  union.  The  men 
accepted  the  concessions  and  returned  to  work.  During 
the  next  two  years  they  fortified  their  treasury  and  pre- 
pared to  strike  again.  John  Mitchell  had  become  presi- 
dent of  the  United  Mine  Workers.  In  February,  1902, 
he  addressed  a  circular  letter  to  the  presidents  of  the 
anthracite  railroads  inviting  them  to  a  joint  conference. 
The  railroad  presidents  refused  to  have  anything  to  do 
with  the  union.  The  anthracite  miners  then  made  a 
public  proposal  that  the  issues  should  be  submitted  to  the 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  63 

arbitration  of  the  Industrial  Branch  of  the  National  Civic 
Federation,  of  which  Senator  Hanna  was  chairman,  or  of 
Archbishop  Ireland,  Bishop  Potter,  and  one  other  person 
to  be  selected  by  these  two.  But  all  such  tentatives  were 
also  rejected  by  the  operators.  It  was  about  this  time 
that  Mr.  George  F.  Baer,  president  of  the  Philadelphia 
and  Reading  Coal  Company  and  of  the  Reading  Railway 
System,  made  his  interesting  declaration  that  "the  rights 
and  interests  of  the  laboring  man  will  be  protected  and 
cared  for,  not  by  the  labor  agitators,  but  by  the  Christian 
men  to  whom  God  has  given  the  control  of  the  property 
interests  of  the  country." 

Efforts  at  conference  and  arbitration  having  failed,  the 
anthracite  miners  called  a  strike.  Only  a  minority  of  the 
men  had  previously  joined  the  union,  but  ninety  men  in  a 
hundred  obeyed  the  strike  call.  The  bituminous  miners 
were  eager  to  declare  a  sympathetic  strike,  but  they  had 
collective  agreements  in  the  more  important  fields  and 
their  president,  John  Mitchell,  and  their  secretary,  Wil- 
liam B.  Wilson,  afterwards  Secretary  of  Labor  in  Presi- 
dent Wilson's  cabinet,  insisted  upon  honoring  these  con- 
tracts. Trade  union  discipline  had  grown  stronger  since 
the  days  of  Siney  and  Mitchell's  counsel  prevailed.  The 
anthracite  strike  dragged  on  throughout  the  summer. 
Winter  was  approaching.  President  Roosevelt  decided 
to  intervene.  There  was  no  precedent  for  such  interven- 
tion in  the  coal  industry,  which  though  basic  to  the  indus- 
trial life  of  the  nation,  was  held  sacred  to  the  traditional 
rights  of  private  ownership  and  business  initiative.  In  his 
address  to  the  miners  and  operators,  President  Roosevelt 
expressed  his  sense  of  the  unprecedented  character  of 
his  action. 

"As  long,"  he  said,  "as  there  seemed  to  be  a  reasonable 


64  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

hope  that  these  matters  could  be  adjusted  between  the 
parties  it  did  not  seem  proper  for  me  to  interfere  in  any- 
way. I  disclaim  any  right  or  duty  to  interfere  in  any 
way,  upon  legal  grounds  or  upon  any  official  relation  that 
I  bear  to  the  situation.  But  the  urgency  and  the  terrible 
nature  of  the  catastrophe  impending,  where  a  large  por- 
tion of  our  people,  in  the  shape  of  a  winter  fuel  famine, 
are  concerned,  impel  me  after  anxious  thought  to  beHeve 
that  my  duty  requires  me  to  use  whatever  influence  I 
personally  can  bring  to  bear  to  end  a  situation  which  has 
become  literally  impossible." 

In  spite  of  his  disavowal  of  legal  authority  or  official 
responsibility.  President  Roosevelt's  action  was  publicly 
regarded  as  the  official  action  of  the  nation's  chief  execu- 
tive. It  gave  the  public  its  first  intimation  of  the  status 
of  coal  as  that  of  a  public  utility.  It  stamped  upon  the 
coal  industry  the  character  of  an  essential  public  service 
which  has  attached  to  it  ever  since.  Backed  by  public 
opinion,  which  would  have  sustained  him  if  he  had  de- 
clared the  existence  of  a  public  emergency  and  had  taken 
over  the  anthracite  industry  as  the  government  did  the 
entire  coal  industry  during  the  war,  he  was  able  to  force 
the  submission  of  the  dispute  to  a  commission  of  arbitra- 
tion by  whose  decision  both  sides  pledged  themselves  to 
abide.  The  strike  was  settled.  A  machinery  of  govern- 
ment was  established  and  put  into  operation.  As  the  re- 
sult of  President  Roosevelt's  action,  collective  bargaining 
was  for  the  first  time  given  public  sanction  not  only  in  the 
anthracite  field  but  throughout  the  coal  industry.  For 
seventeen  years,  and  indeed,  with  the  exception  of  a  brief 
interval  in  1919,  for  twenty  years,  peace  and  constitu- 
tional government  prevailed  not  only  in  the  anthracite 
field,  but,  with  the  exception  of  a  few  districts,  notably 


THE  STRUGGLE  FOR  ORGANIZATION  65 

certain  counties  in  West  Virginia  and  the  coking  fields 
subsidiary  to  the  steel  industry  in  Pennsylvania,  Colo- 
rado, and  Alabama,  throughout  the  bituminous  fields  also. 
The  structure  of  this  government  and  its  basic  laws  are 
written  into  collective  contracts,  which,  together  with  the 
policies  formulated  by  the  two  parties  through  their 
national  organizations,  must  be  our  guides  in  the  quest 
for  an  answer  to  the  question  as  to  how,  short  of  the 
autocratic  control  of  the  Fuel  Administration,  the  coal 
industry  is  to  be  developed  into  an  integrated,  dependably 
governed,  public  service. 


CHAPTER  VII 
The  Rise  of  Democracy 

The  historians  of  the  growth  of  democratic  government 
in  the  coal  industry  generally  date  the  establishment  of 
collective  bargaining  as  a  permanent  institution  from 
1898,  when  the  operators  of  the  Central  Competitive 
Field — Western  Pennsylvania,  Ohio,  Indiana,  and  Illi- 
nois— in  a  joint  conference  with  the  representatives  of 
the  United  Mine  Workers  of  America  entered  into  an 
agreement  which  with  minor  modifications  was  periodi- 
cally renewed  from  that  time  onward.  From  that  year  to 
1922  operators  and  miners  alike  recognized  the  agree- 
ment in  the  Central  Competitive  Field  as  basic  to  the 
agreements  in  all  other  fields  and  the  central  competitive 
conference  as  the  necessary  prelude  to  all  other  confer- 
ences. But  it  was  President  Roosevelt  and  the  Anthracite 
Strike  Commission  which  he  appointed  that  lifted  human 
relationships  within  the  industry  out  of  the  limbo  of 
frontier  strife  and  periodic  guerrilla  warfare  and  stamped 
them  with  the  quasi-public  character  of  a  self-governing 
constitutional  democracy. 

From  the  beginning,  certain  of  the  coal  owners,  notably 
those  in  sections  of  West  Virginia  and  Alabama,  whose 
coking  coals  make  them  economically  subsidiary  to  the 
steel  industry,  have  held  strongly  to  the  autocratic  powers 
and  privileges  which  the  conception  of  property  carried 
over  from  the  pre-revolutionary  monarchical  days  when 


THE  RISE  OF  DEMOCRACY  67 

the  king  was  generally  recognized,  Dei  gratia,  as  the  custo- 
dian of  the  national  hoard.  But  the  Roosevelt  Commis- 
sion took  the  stand  which  has  increasingly  won  public 
acceptance,  that  autocracy  in  industry  is  incompatible  with 
democracy  in  the  political  state,  and  that  they  must  both 
rise  or  fall  together.  Forms  may  change,  but  it  may  be 
taken  as  axiomatic  that  if  democracy  is  the  law  deter- 
mining the  evolution  of  political  civilization, — if  it  is  the 
condition  of  the  full  development  of  the  individual  per- 
sonality and  the  attainment  of  the  good  life  and  human 
brotherhood, — it  will  survive  and  grow  in  industry  as  well 
as  in  the  political  realm.  It  is  from  this  principle  of 
democratic  evolution,  and  not  from  the  strikes  and  lock- 
outs and  barterings  over  wages,  hours,  and  profits  inci- 
dental to  its  development,  that  collective  bargaining  and 
industrial  democracy  derive  their  fundamental  signifi- 
cance. 

In  appointing  the  Commission  "at  the  request  both  of 
the  operators  and  of  the  miners,"  President  Roosevelt 
asked  them  not  only  to  pass  upon  the  questions  in  contro- 
versy, but  also  "to  establish  the  relations  between  the  em- 
ployers and  the  wage  workers  in  the  anthracite  fields  on 
a  just  and  permanent  basis." 

In  arbitrating  the  immediate  questions  in  dispute, — 
questions  of  wages,  hours,  and  working  conditions, — the 
Commission,  even  after  months  of  hearings  at  which 
hundreds  of  witnesses  appeared,  found  themselves  in  the 
usual  predicament  of  arbitrators  and  the  lay  public  in 
such  circumstances.  The  facts  about  the  industry, — its 
capital  investment,  its  financial  organization,  its  earnings 
and  profits,  the  cost  of  living  in  the  district,  the  organiza- 
tion of  work  in  the  mines,  the  character  of  the  work,  the 
skill  which  it  required,  and  its  attendant  hazards, — had 


68  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

never  been  scientifically  determined.  Then  as  now  these 
essential  facts  were  held  to  lie  within  the  sacred  province 
of  private  business  enterprise  and  not  within  the  legiti- 
mate scope  of  public  inquiry  and  revelation.  In  instance 
after  instance,  they  found  that  statistics  of  the  kind  pre- 
sented were  "rather  too  inexact  for  a  satisfactory  basis 
on  which  to  make  precise  calculations."  On  the  demands 
of  the  miners  and  the  counter-demands  of  the  operators, 
they  were  reluctantly  constrained  to  adopt  the  usual 
refuge  of  arbitration  tribunals  set  up  in  an  emergency; 
they  "split  the  difference."  The  miners,  for  example, 
asked  for  a  twenty  per  cent  increase  in  their  rate  of 
wages ;  the  Commission  granted  them  ten  per  cent.  Other 
issues  were  not  susceptible  of  such  definite  arbitrament, 
but  in  general  the  Commission,  striving  to  hold  the  scales 
of  justice  even,  followed  the  rule  of  fifty-fifty. 

In  presenting  their  award,  the  Commission,  keenly 
aware  of  the  almost  impossible  burden  which  the  absence 
of  scientific  knowledge  with  respect  to  this  basic  industry 
placed  upon  them,  declared  that  "all  through  their  investi- 
gations and  deliberations  the  conviction  had  grown  upon 
them  that  if  they  could  evoke  and  confirm  a  more  genuine 
spirit  of  good  will,  a  more  conciliatory  disposition  in  the 
operators  and  their  employes  in  their  relations  toward  one 
another,  they  would  do  a  better  and  more  lasting  work 
than  any  which  mere  rulings,  however  wise  and  just,  may 
accomplish."  It  was  with  this  end  in  view  that  they  set 
up  a  scheme  of  constitutional  democratic  government 
within  the  industry. 

Quotation  is  often  dull,  but  nothing  can  take  the  place 
of  direct  quotation  in  the  case  of  a  document  of  epoch- 
making  importance.  By  way  of  justifying  their  action 
the  Commission  declared  that  "in  the  days  when  the  em- 


THE  RISE  OF  DEMOCRACY  69 

ployer  had  but  a  few  employes,  personal  acquaintance  and 
direct  contact  of  the  employer  and  employe  resulted  in 
mutual  knowledge  of  the  surrounding  conditions  and  the 
desires  of  each.  The  development  of  the  employers  into 
large  corporations  has  rendered  such  personal  contact  and 
acquaintance  between  the  responsible  employer  and  the 
individual  employe  no  longer  possible  in  the  old  sense. 
The  tendency  toward  peace  and  good-fellowship  which 
flows  out  of  personal  acquaintance  or  direct  contact 
should  not,  however,  be  lost  through  this  evolution  of 
great  combinations.  There  seems  to  be  no  medium 
through  which  to  preserve  it,  so  natural  and  efficient  as 
that  of  an  organization  of  employes  governed  by  rules 
which  represent  the  will  of  a  properly  constituted  majority 
of  its  members,  and  officered  by  members  selected  for 
that  purpose,  and  in  whom  authority  to  administer  the 
rules  and  affairs  of  the  union  and  its  members  is  vested." 

The  anthracite  operators  had  conditioned  their  sub- 
mission to  the  award  of  the  Commission  by  refusing  to 
be  drawn  into  a  collective  agreement  with  the  miners' 
national  organization,  the  United  Mine  Workers  of 
America.  The  Commission  got  around  this  technicality 
by  constituting  the  anthracite  district  divisions  of  the 
union  and  the  organized  anthracite  operators  the  two 
houses  of  the  anthracite  parliament.  The  democratic  gov- 
ernment which  they  set  up  is  typical  of  the  scheme  of 
government  which  now  prevails  through  eighty  per  cent 
of  the  coal  industry,  and  which,  while  it  is  subject  to  the 
fluctuations  characteristic  of  all  democratic  institutions, 
may  be  taken  as  permanent  in  principle. 

Again,  because  of  its  historical  importance,  the  lan- 
guage of  the  Commission  calls  for  direct  quotation.  The 
Commission  decreed :  "That  any  difficulty  or  disagreement 


70  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

arising  under  this  award,  either  as  to  interpretation  or 
appHcation,  or  in  any  way  growing  out  of  the  relations  of 
the  employers  and  employed,  which  can  not  be  settled  or 
adjusted  by  consultation  between  the  superintendent  or 
manager  of  the  mine  or  mines  and  the  miner  or  miners 
directly  interested,  or  is  of  a  scope  too  large  to  be  so 
settled  or  adjusted,  shall  be  referred  to  a  permanent  joint 
committee,  to  be  called  a  board  of  conciliation,  to  consist 
of  six  persons,  appointed  as  hereinafter  provided.  That 
is  to  say,  if  there  shall  be  a  division  of  the  whole  region 
into  three  districts,  in  each  of  which  there  shall  exist  an 
organization  representing  a  majority  of  the  mine  workers 
of  such  district,  one  of  said  board  of  conciHation  shall  be 
appointed  by  each  of  said  organizations,  and  three  persons 
shall  be  appointed  by  the  operators,  the  operators  in  each 
of  said  districts  appointing  one  person. 

"The  board  of  conciliation  thus  constituted  shall  take 
up  and  consider  any  question  referred  to  it  as  aforesaid, 
hearing  both  parties  to  the  controversy,  and  such  evi- 
dence as  may  be  laid  before  it  by  either  party;  and  any 
award  made  by  a  majority  of  such  board  of  conciliation 
shall  be  final  and  binding  on  all  parties.  If,  however,  the 
said  board  is  unable  to  decide  any  question  submitted,  or 
point  related  thereto,  that  question  or  point  shall  be  re- 
ferred to  an  umpire,  to  be  appointed,  at  the  request  of  said 
board,  by  one  of  the  circuit  judges  of  the  third  judicial 
circuit  of  the  United  States,  whose  decision  shall  be  final 
and  binding  in  the  premises. 

"The  membership  of  said  board  shall  at  all  times  be 
kept  complete,  either  the  operators  or  the  miners'  organi- 
zations having  the  right,  at  any  time  when  a  controversy 
is  not  pending,  to  change  their  representation  thereon. 

"At  all  hearings  before  said  board  the  parties  may  be 


THE  RISE  OF  DEMOCRACY  71 

represented  by  such  person  or  persons  as  they  may  respec- 
tively select. 

"No  suspension  of  work  shall  take  place,  by  lock-out 
or  strike,  pending  the  adjudication  of  any  matter  so  taken 
up  for  adjustment." 

From  the  date  of  the  Commission's  award  to  1919, 
when  President  Wilson  created  a  similar  commission  to 
avert  a  threatened  break,  the  anthracite  operators  and 
miners,  who  were  invariably  represented  by  the  presidents 
of  the  three  district  organizations  of  the  United  Mine 
Workers  of  America,  lived  at  peace  under  this  consti- 
tution. 

The  machinery  of  constitutional  government  thus  given 
public  sanction  in  the  anthracite  field  is  in  its  general 
outline  and  provisions  typical  of  the  machinery  which 
through  joint  conference  and  negotiation  the  organized 
miners  and  operators  have  worked  out  throughout  the 
greater  part  of  the  bituminous  fields.  The  miners  act 
under  the  authority  of  their  national  convention  when  it 
is  in  session  and  under  the  general  direction  of  their 
national  president  and  executive  board,  acting  under  laws 
devised  by  the  national  convention  in  the  interval  be- 
tween the  national  convention's  biennial  sessions.  Within 
the  limitations  set  by  the  national  laws  of  the  organiza- 
tion, the  four  thousand  local  unions  and  the  twenty-seven 
district  unions  exercise  a  degree  of  local  autonomy  analo- 
gous to  the  local  autonomy  of  our  cities,  towns,  counties, 
and  states.  In  fact  the  entire  national  organization  is  built 
up  from  the  mine  committees  at  the  individual  mines, 
which,  conjointly  with  the  representative  of  the  manage- 
ment at  the  mine,  are  the  courts  of  original  jurisdiction. 
As  in  the  case  of  our  states  in  relation  to  the  federal 
government,  these  local  bodies  reserve  all  authority  that 


72  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

is  not  specifically  delegated  to  the  national  organization 
through  its  constitution  and  the  action  of  the  national 
convention,  the  representative  national  congress  of  the 
union.  Unlike  the  President  of  the  United  States,  the 
president  of  the  United  Mine  Workers  has  no  power  to 
appoint  and  remove  his  cabinet — ^the  National  Executive 
Board — but  through  his  power  over  the  national  organ- 
izers and  the  other  agents  of  the  national  office,  he  is  in  a 
position  to  control  the  political  machinery  of  the  organiza- 
tion. By  virtue  of  its  form  of  organization,  the  miners' 
union  has  the  virtues  as  well  as  the  defects  of  our 
American  political  organization,  defects  which  are  the 
price  of  self-government  and  the  educative  processes  of 
self-government. 

Because  of  the  compact  nature  of  the  anthracite  field 
and  its  domination  by  a  small  group  of  railroads,  the 
operators  of  this  field  have  acted  in  concert  for  many  dec- 
ades. But  until  1917,  the  coal  owners  of  the  country 
had  no  national  organization.  In  that  year,  for  the  pur- 
poses of  negotiation  with  the  federal  government  relative 
to  the  controlled  production  and  price  of  bituminous  coal, 
they  organized  the  National  Coal  Association.  Unlike 
the  miners'  national  organization,  this  Association  is  not 
by  its  certificate  of  incorporation  explicitly  concerned 
with  the  wage  contract  or  industrial  relations  as  such. 
Its  primary  object  is  the  "encouragement  and  fostering 
of  the  general  welfare  of  the  coal-mining  industry"  as  a 
business  enterprise.  It  is,  however,  acquiring  many  of  the 
functions  of  the  miners'  union.  In  recent  controversies 
it  has  actively  assisted  the  local  operators'  associations  in 
their  dealings  with  their  organized  employes.  And  like 
the  miners'  national  organization  it  actively  concerns 
itself  with  the  protection  and  advancement  of  the  inter- 


THE  RISE  OF  DEMOCRACY  7Z 

ests  of  its  members  in  Congress  and  the  state  legislatures. 
But  the  immense  extent  of  the  bituminous  coal  fields 
and  the  highly  competitive  character  of  the  industry, 
which  has  been  artificially  maintained  by  the  Sherman 
law,  has  prevented  the  compact  organization  of  the  bitu- 
minous operators  and  has  limited  concerted  action,  espe- 
cially in  matters  affecting  the  labor  contract,  almost  en- 
tirely to  local,  state,  and  district  associations.  It  is  upon 
the  miners'  organization  that  the  operators  largely  rely 
to  equalize  competitive  conditions.  For  wages  constitute 
the  largest  single  item  of  cost  in  coal  production  and  it  is 
only  through  the  ability  of  the  miners'  union  to  negotiate 
on  a  nation-wide  basis  that  this  burden  can  be  equalized 
for  the  thousands  of  competing  operators. 

The  inability  of  the  operators  to  achieve  a  national 
organization  has  not  only  contributed  to  the  overdevelop- 
ment of  the  industry  with  consequences  that  became  criti- 
cally manifest  during  the  war,  but  has  also  greatly  com- 
plicated the  struggle  of  the  miners  to  establish  collective 
negotiation  and  agreement  on  a  national  scale.  In  Illinois, 
for  example,  there  are  three  operators'  associations  which 
have  been  organized  to  deal  with  labor.  The  oldest  of 
these  is  the  Illinois  Coal  Operators'  Association  formed 
in  1897.  During  a  wage  controversy  in  1910  the  opera- 
tors of  the  fifth  and  ninth  Illinois  districts  broke  away 
from  the  parent  body  and  formed  an  association  of  their 
own.  In  1914,  the  operators  of  the  Springfield  district 
organized  the  independent  Central  Illinois  Coal  Opera- 
tors' Association,  Diversity  of  mining  conditions  in  the 
various  sections  of  the  Illinois  coal  field  and  the  inabiHty 
of  the  operators  to  equalize  competitive  costs  without  the 
help  of  the  miners  were  responsible  for  these  secessions. 
One  of  the  objects  enumerated  in  the  constitution  of  the 


74  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

Central  Illinois  Coal  Operators'  Association  is  "to  pro- 
tect the  interest  of  the  members  of  this  association  in  the 
making  of  district,  state,  and  interstate  contracts  with  the 
United  Mine  Workers,  to  the  end  that  such  members 
shall  obtain  scales,  rates,  prices,  conditions,  and  such  dif- 
ferentials from  the  basic  rates  as  the  relative  physical 
and  other  working  conditions  of  the  mines  owned  by  them 
entitle  them  to."  An  identical  clause  appears  in  the  con- 
stitution of  the  Coal  Operators'  Association  of  the  fifth 
and  ninth  districts  of  Illinois.  In  1910  the  operators  in 
these  two  districts  were  paying  seven  cents  a  ton  more 
than  other  members  of  the  parent  association.  They 
seceded  and  entered  into  a  separate  agreement  with  the 
union  in  the  hope  that  the  union  would  be  able  to  abolish 
this  unfavorable  differential.  The  union  succeeded  only 
in  reducing  the  differential  to  four  cents.  While  these 
three  associations  compete  with  one  another  for  terms 
with  the  miners'  union  within  their  own  state,  they  co- 
operate in  their  common  effort  to  secure  from  the  miners 
terms  that  will  place  them  at  a  competitive  advantage  as 
against  operators  in  other  states.  This  rivalry  among 
the  operators  makes  the  diplomatic  problem  of  the  union's 
national  officers  a  very  difficult  one  and  when  groups  of 
operators,  like  those  in  certain  counties  of  West  Virginia 
and  Alabama,  refuse  to  deal  with  the  union  at  all  and 
impose  cut-rate  wage  scales  upon  their  unorganized 
employes  as  a  basis  for  cutting  the  price  of  coal  in  the 
limited  market,  the  industry  is  thrown  into  confusion 
bordering  upon  anarchy.  The  operators  in  the  organized 
fields  hold  the  union  responsible  for  its  failure  to  organize 
the  anti-union  fields  and  so  to  equalize  competitive  con- 
ditions. Many  of  them  decide  that  their  only  remedy  is 
to  break  with  the  union  and  through  individual  bargain- 


THE  RISE  OF  DEMOCRACY  75 

ing  with  their  employes  when  the  labor  market  is  over- 
stocked force  down  wages  and  working  conditions  to  the 
level  of  the  anti-union  fields.  The  organized  miners  are 
thus  compelled  to  fight  for  their  organization  and  the 
maintenance  of  their  dearly  won  standard  of  living. 
Strikes  and  lockouts  temporarily  take  the  place  of  the 
orderly  processes  of  joint  negotiation,  conciliation,  and 
collective  agreement  as  in  the  spring  of  1922. 

The  processes  of  conflict  and  cooperation  through 
which  government  in  industry,  as  in  the  state,  evolves,  are 
as  truly  cosmic  processes  as  those  through  which  the  coal 
measures  themselves  were  created,  with  the  humanly  sig- 
nificant difference  that  the  processes  of  social  evolution 
are,  within  certain  limits,  controllable  by  the  will  of  man. 
The  policy  of  democratic  peoples  and  therefore  of  their 
governments  is  to  allow  the  maximum  freedom  of  devel- 
opment to  government  within  industry  compatible  with 
the  comfort  and  economic  security  of  the  community  as 
a  whole.  Where  the  security  of  the  community  is  threat- 
ened, the  government  tends  to  intervene  as  President 
Roosevelt  did  in  the  case  of  the  anthracite  controversy. 
And  while  the  traditional  bias  of  government  and  the 
law, — the  bias  which  they  inherited  from  the  feudal  soci- 
ety which  existed  when  the  industrial  revolution  began, — 
favors  the  owners  of  property  to  which  a  special  sanctity 
still  adheres,  public  opinion  among  peoples  devoted  to 
democracy  in  the  political  state  increasingly  tends  to  assert 
itself  in  favor  of  democracy  in  industry,  and  more  espe- 
cially such  basic  industries  as  the  railroads  and  coal.  It 
is  for  this  reason  that  it  is  logical  to  assume  that  the 
point  of  view  toward  collective  bargaining,  expressed  by 
President  Roosevelt's  Commission  and  incorporated  into 
the  social  creeds  of  most  of  the  Christian  denominations, 


76  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

will  ultimately  prevail.  And  since  collective  bargaining 
and  the  orderly  processes  of  government  initiated  by  the 
joint  labor  contracts  are  the  historical  foundations  of 
democracy  in  industry,  it  is  also  reasonable  to  infer  that 
collective  bargaining  will  increasingly  become  the  rule  in 
industrial  relations. 

But  there  are  large  issues  of  momentous  public  concern 
which  do  not  come  within  the  scope  of  collective  bargain- 
ing. Rule  15  in  the  standard  agreement  between  the 
operators  and  the  miners  in  the  bituminous  fields  of 
central  Pennsylvania  specifically  forbids  the  miners  to 
concern  themselves  in  any  way  with  the  problems  of 
management  and  the  technical  equipment  and  organiza- 
tion of  the  mines.  Because  of  the  great  abundance  of 
coal,  the  industry  had  been  developed  by  overexpansion 
and  wasteful  skimming  rather  than  by  the  application  of 
scientific  methods  to  the  mining  of  the  best  coal  and  its 
efficient  utilization.  Not  only  is  one  ton  of  coal  left 
irrecoverably  underground  for  every  ton  brought  to  the 
surface,  but  less  than  one-half  of  the  economic  value  of 
coal  is  utilized  by  our  primitive  methods  of  consumption. 
In  a  time  when  it  is  possible  to  transform  coal  into  gas 
and  electricity  at  the  mine  and  transport  its  fuel  and 
power  cheaply  by  pipe  and  wire,  thirty  per  cent  of  our 
entire  coal  production  is  used  for  transportation  by  steam 
engines  that  harness  up  only  from  nine  to  twelve  per  cent 
of  the  energy  in  a  ton  of  coal  in  a  way  that  will  actually 
pull  a  train — and  a  third  of  all  the  freight  tonnage  carried 
by  the  railroads  is  coal.  Moreover  our  modern  chemical 
industries,  such  as  the  dye  industry,  are  based  upon  the 
substances  contained  in  bituminous  coal,  most  of  which 
are  wasted  in  our  customary  methods  of  consumption. 
These  facts  impose  an  immense  burden  of  needless  cost 


THE  RISE  OF  DEMOCRACY  77 

upon  the  consumer,  and  draw  into  the  overexpanded  coal 
industry  tens  of  thousands  of  miners  in  excess  of  efficient 
requirements.  The  owners  are  therefore  subject  to  wide 
fluctuations  in  the  price  of  their  product,  the  miners  are 
the  victims  of  intermittent  and  irregular  employment 
with  consequent  uncertainty  of  earnings,  and  the  public 
ultimately  foots  the  bill,  which,  as  has  already  been 
pointed  out,  Mr.  F.  G.  Tryon  of  the  U.  S.  Geological 
Survey  calculates  at  one  million  dollars  for  each  working 
day  paid  in  unofficial  and  needless  taxation,  and  the 
miners,  by  the  terms  of  the  collective  agreement  are  ex- 
plicitly debarred  from  all  participation  in  the  solution  of 
these  problems  of  management. 

As  a  remedy,  bituminous  operators  have  proposed  that 
they  shall  be  relieved  of  the  restrictions  of  the  Sherman 
law,  so  that  they  may  combine  to  limit  production  and 
regulate  distribution  and  prices  as  the  anthracite  owners 
have  succeeded  in  doing.  The  miners,  by  resolution  of 
their  national  convention,  have  proposed  a  policy  of  public 
ownership  and  democratic  administration,  the  entrusting 
of  the  technical  regulation  and  development  of  the  mines 
to  engineers  appointed  by  the  government  and  the  admin- 
istration of  labor  relations  by  a  democratic  tribunal  com- 
posed of  representatives  of  the  technical  management,  the 
public,  and  the  miners.  The  effectiveness  of  either  policy 
would  be  contingent  upon  the  application  to  the  mines  and 
their  product  of  the  scientific  knowledge  which  has  been 
rapidly  accumulating  during  the  last  decade  and  very  little 
of  which  is  now  applied  to  the  industry.  The  character 
of  the  political  reconstruction  of  the  industry,  which  pub- 
lic necessity  must  sooner  or  later  compel,  will  be  largely 
determined  by  the  outcome  of  the  impending  technical 
revolution  in  the  production  and  utilization  of  coal. 


CHAPTER  VIII 
Rivals  of  Coal 

Until  recently  it  has  been  taken  for  granted  that  there 
was  plenty  of  coal.  The  industrial  revolution  rose  and 
triumphed  on  the  theory  of  an  inexhaustible  supply. 
Mines  were  opened  casually  here  and  there  and  such  coal 
as  was  easy  to  get  was  taken  from  the  reserves  which 
were  supposed  to  be  bottomless.  And  men  were  poured 
into  the  mines,  thousands  in  excess  of  the  need.  They 
were  as  plentiful  as  the  coal.  Because  of  these  two 
things — the  vast  amount  of  coal  and  the  cheap  and  abun- 
dant man  power — ^the  coal  industry  came  through  the 
industrial  revolution  which  it  created,  without  being 
itself  revolutionized. 

Now  the  coal  supply  is  large,  but  it  is  not  by  any  means 
unlimited.  No  one  can  increase  it.  There  is  no  way  of 
manufacturing  coal.  The  limitations  of  the  supply  were 
fixed  by  the  geographical  revolution.  Twenty  million 
years  ago  all  the  coal  we  have  or  shall  have  was  packed 
away  in  the  ribs  of  the  earth  in  seams  varying  from  sixty 
feet  to  the  thickness  of  a  blade  of  grass.  It  is  estimated 
that  we  still  have  in  the  world  more  than  seven  thousand 
billion  tons  distributed  as  follows: 


North  America 

Asia 

Europe 

Australasia 

Africa 

South  America 

Total 


5,073,431,000,000 

1,279,586,000,000 

784,190,000,000 

170,410,000,000 

57,839,000,000 

32,097,000,000 

7,397,553,000,000 


RIVALS  OF  COAL  79 

This  seems  like  a  vast  amount  which  even  wasteful  pro- 
duction could  hardly  exhaust  in  thousands  of  years.  But 
much  of  the  supply  is  of  such  low  grade  as  to  be  inefficient 
as  a  steam  producer,  much  of  it  occurs  at  such  deep 
levels  or  so  remote  from  the  centers  of  population  as  to  be 
commercially  unprofitable  to  mine.  Mr.  Floyd  W.  Par- 
sons, formerly  editor  of  the  Coal  Age,  has  warned  us 
that  "each  year  now  witnesses  the  exhaustion  of  a  num- 
ber of  high-grade  coal  areas.  Far  more  mines  producing 
better  grades  of  coal  are  being  worked  out  than  there  are 
new  mines  commencing  to  produce.  .  .  .  Operating  com- 
panies are  now  going  over  their  acreage,  taking  out  pillars 
and  working  low-grade  thin  seams."  And  Mr.  D.  B. 
Rushmore,  chief  engineer  in  the  power  and  mining  de- 
partment of  the  General  Electric  Company,  calculates 
that  if  our  coal  consumption  were  to  continue  to  increase 
at  the  apparently  normal  rate  of  seven  per  cent  each  year, 
the  life  of  our  known  reserves  would  be  as  follows : 

Eastern  District,  which  includes  the  most  accessible 

and  best  quality  of  our  fuel  ....  59  years 
Eastern,  Central,  and  Southern  Districts  ...  65  years 
Entire  U,  S.  and  Alaska,  two-thirds  of  this  being 

low-grade  coals  and  lignites        ....        84  years 

These  figures  are  based  upon  the  appraisals  of  the 
U.  S.  Geological  Survey.  They  include  coal  in  veins  as 
shallow  as  fourteen  inches,  all  coal  whose  ash  content 
does  not  exceed  thirty  per  cent,  and  all  known  deposits 
within  six  thousand  feet  of  the  surface.  They  are  based 
on  the  optimistic  assumption  that  two-thirds  of  the  coal 
in  the  mines  will  be  brought  to  the  surface,  a  considerably 
higher  recovery  than  has  hitherto  been  achieved.  Mr. 
Rushmore  concludes  that  the  evidence  points  unmistak- 


80  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

ably  to  an  approaching  scarcity  of  high-grade  coal  and 
increasingly  higher  prices. 

One  of  the  greatest  single  causes  of  waste  and  increased 
prices  is  our  antiquated  system  of  distributing  the  energy 
contained  in  coal.  It  is  estimated  that  every  hundred 
tons  of  coal  shipped  involves  the  burning  of  ten  tons  in 
railroad  locomotives.  There  is  no  longer  any  technical 
justification  for  transporting  power  in  the  enormously 
bulky  form  of  coal  when  it  could  be  much  more  efficiently 
distributed  by  pipe  and  wire  in  the  form  of  gas  and  elec- 
tricity. Even  were  it  not  enormously  inefficient,  there  are 
definite  physical  limits  beyond  which  the  steam  haulage 
of  coal  in  bulk  cannot  be  increased — certain  bottle  necks 
like  that  through  which  the  Lehigh  River  flows,  narrow 
edges  like  that  along  the  Susquehanna,  where  no  more 
slow  puffing  trains  can  go  toiling  up  and  down  the  slippery 
grades,  because  there  is  no  more  room  for  them  on  the 
tracks.  Already  the  load  upon  the  antiquated  steam  rail- 
roads is  too  heavy  for  them  to  bear,  so  that  the  system  of 
transportation  breaks  down  under  every  peak  load  and  in 
every  crisis  such  as  that  induced  by  the  war. 

Moreover  our  methods  of  consumption  are  incredibly 
wasteful.  Mr.  George  Otis  Smith,  Director  of  the  U.  S. 
Geological  Survey,  has  prepared  a  chart  showing  that  of 
every  two  thousand  pounds  of  coal,  six  hundred  pounds 
are  lost  in  mining,  one  hundred  and  twenty-six  pounds 
are  consumed  at  the  mine  and  en  route  to  the  boiler  room, 
four  hundred  and  forty-six  pounds  are  lost  in  gases  going 
up  the  stack,  fifty-one  pounds  are  lost  by  radiation  and 
fifty-one  in  the  ash  pit,  six  hundred  and  fifty  pounds  are 
lost  in  converting  heat  energy  into  mechanical  energy,  and 
only  seventy-six  pounds  out  of  the  two  thousand  are 
actually   converted   into   productive   mechanical   energy. 


RIVALS  OF  COAL  81 

After  two  hundred  years  of  mechanical  invention,  we  are 
still  stupidly  content  to  dissipate  ninety-six  per  cent  of  the 
labor-saving  value  of  coal. 

But  even  if  the  coal  supply  were  unlimited,  if  every 
year  a  new  crop  grew  to  take  the  place  of  the  one  con- 
sumed, even  if  it  were  physically  possible  for  the  rail- 
roads to  carry  an  ever-increasing  load,  the  miners  are  not 
willing  to  get  it  out  on  the  same  old  basis  of  low  wages, 
high  hazards,  and  demoralizing  irregularity  of  employ- 
ment. Man  power  has  changed  its  own  status.  In  1919 
the  wages  of  common  labor  at  the  mines  were  fixed  at 
seven  and  a  half  dollars  a  day.  As  wages  go,  this  would 
have  meant  a  reasonably  fair  standard  of  living  if  work  in 
the  mines  had  been  steady.  But  during  the  last  thirty 
years  the  mines  have  been  idle  an  average  of  ninety-three 
days  in  every  three  hundred  and  eight  working  days  in 
the  year,  and  during  1921  the  miner  was  fortunate  who 
got  as  much  as  two  days  of  work  in  the  week,  that  is, 
fifteen  dollars  a  week  and  seven  hundred  and  eighty  dol- 
lars a  year.  The  hazards  of  mining  have  increased.  The 
U.  S.  Bureau  of  Mines  tells  us  that  while  in  1890  the 
death  rate  of  coal  miners  was  2.15  for  every  thousand 
men  employed,  in  1914  the  rate  had  increased  to  3.19. 
In  1890  between  three  and  four  miners  were  killed  for 
every  million  tons  mined ;  in  1914  between  four  and  five 
miners  were  killed  for  every  million  tons.  Labor  is  no 
longer  content  to  be  sacrificed  in  order  to  put  an  increas- 
ing stream  of  cheap  coal  into  the  fire  boxes  of  engines  that 
waste  nine-tenths  and  more  of  their  labor  and  so  deprive 
them  of  the  possibility  of  the  good  life  according  to 
American  standards.  They  are  taking  stock  and  evaluat- 
ing themselves.  Some  of  their  demands,  like  the  six-hour 
day,  five  days  a  week,  are  socially  unwise,  but  they  repre- 


82  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

sent  a  just  protest  against  the  demoralizing  intermittency 
of  employment.  The  demand  is  simply  an  effort  to  spread 
the  actual  hours  of  work  evenly  throughout  the  year. 
Already  the  conditions  imposed  by  the  unions  in  the  inter- 
est of  a  reasonable  standard  of  living  act  as  a  strong  dif- 
ferential against  the  mining  of  difficult  seams  and  poor 
grades  of  coal.  They  are  rapidly  getting  into  a  position 
where  they  can  dictate  the  conditions  under  which  they 
will  hazard  their  lives  underground.  And  these  are  not 
conditions  which  the  coal  industry  with  its  competitive 
overdevelopment,  its  load  of  parasite  railroads,  sales 
companies,  company-owned  houses  and  stores,  its  ineffi- 
cient operating  methods,  and  particularly  its  antiquated 
energy-producing  equipment  on  which  it  must  pay  heavy 
interest,  is  prepared  to  meet. 

Because  the  supply  of  coal  cannot  much  longer  meet 
the  cumulatively  wasteful  demands  upon  it;  because  the 
railroad  system  is  breaking  down  under  the  increased  bulk 
of  coal  to  be  transported ;  because  the  miners  are  increas- 
ingly insisting  that  the  reward  of  their  hazardous  labor 
must  give  them  a  fair  chance  of  the  good  life  according  to 
American  standards  of  living;  and  because  the  commu- 
nity which  must  be  served  cannot  indefinitely  pay  the 
price  of  inefficiency  and  waste,  the  present  order  in  the 
coal  industry  is  drawing  to  a  close. 

The  technicians  have  seen  this  impending  change  for  a 
long  time.  Through  their  help  the  industrial  revolution 
might  have  reorganized  the  coal  industry  decades  ago 
under  the  pressure  of  an  increasing  demand  for  power, 
if  it  had  not  been  held  off  by  new  discoveries  of  petroleum 
and  natural  gas.  Petroleum,  which  had  been  used  in  a 
small  way  in  many  countries  for  centuries,  first  became 
an  international  commodity  when  Roumania  began  to 


RIVALS  OF  COAL  83 

ship  it  in  1857.  It  took  on  great  industrial  importance 
when  the  first  American  well,  the  famous  Drake  well  in 
Oil  Creek,  Pennsylvania,  was  sunk  in  1859.  But  in  1860 
the  world's  total  recorded  production  was  less  than  five 
hundred  and  ten  thousand  barrels,  of  which  five  hundred 
thousand  barrels  are  credited  to  the  United  States.  By 
1917  the  world  output  had  risen  to  nearly  four  hundred 
and  fifty  million  barrels,  of  which  the  United  States  fur- 
nished nearly  four  hundred  million. 

The  coal  and  petroleum  industries  are  closely  interre- 
lated. Coal  and  petroleum  are  largely  interchangeable  as 
sources  of  energy.  Both  can  be  used  for  fuel  under 
boilers  in  their  crude  state,  although  crude  oil  is  the  more 
efficient;  both  provide  an  illuminating  oil  for  use  in 
lamps,  although  kerosene  is  so  much  better  than  coal  oil 
as  to  have  driven  it  out  of  the  market;  both  furnish  a 
satisfactory  fuel  for  the  internal-combustion  engine,  al- 
though benzol,  a  coal  derivative,  has  not  yet  been  recov- 
ered in  sufficient  quantities  to  make  it  a  competitor  of 
gasoline;  both  provide  a  fuel  gas,  although  that  derived 
from  petroleum  has  the  greater  heat  value.  Ton  for  ton, 
petroleum  has  every  advantage  over  coal,  and  there  is 
every  reason  why  it  should  drive  coal  out  of  its  pre- 
eminent position  in  industry,  except  one — the  limitations 
of  the  supply. 

For  petroleum  is  far  cheaper  to  produce,  not  only  in 
terms  of  money,  but  in  terms  of  human  effort  and  life. 
Compare  with  the  labor  and  hazard  of  opening  and  work- 
ing a  coal  mine  Pogue  and  Gilbert's  description  of  the 
opening  of  an  oil  well. 

"Drilling  an  oil  well  is  commonly  done  by  means  of  a 
heavy  string  of  tools,  suspended  at  the  end  of  a  cable  and 
given  a  churning  motion  by  a  walking  beam  rocked  by  a 


84  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

steam  engine.  .  .  .  The  steel  tools,  falling  under  their 
own  weight,  literally  punch  their  way  to  the  depth 
desired." 

The  usual  custom  is  for  four  men  working  two  twelve- 
hour  shifts  to  sink  a  well.  Their  work  is  to  keep  the 
engine  that  operates  the  drill  running,  to  watch  the 
operation,  and  to  stoke  the  engine.  The  only  danger  is 
when  the  time  has  come  to  "shoot"  the  well.  This  is 
done  only  if  the  oil  does  not  flow  naturally  when  the  oil- 
bearing  strata  are  reached.  The  "shooting"  consists  in 
dropping  a  "go  devil"  upon  canisters  of  nitroglycerine 
to  blow  out  a  cavity  at  the  bottom  in  which  oil  may  col- 
lect. If  the  charge  explodes  before  it  reaches  the  bottom 
of  the  well,  it  may  blow  back  and  wreck  the  derrick,  and 
the  timbers  and  "bull-wheel"  may  fall  upon  the  men.  This 
danger,  which  can  be  obviated  by  the  simple  process  of 
the  men  going  away  until  after  the  charge  has  exploded, 
is  practically  the  only  one  connected  with  drilling  for 
petroleum,  except  for  the  incidental  danger  which  all 
handling  of  high  explosives  necessarily  involves. 

A  well  costs  only  about  one-tenth  as  much  per  foot 
of  descent  as  a  mine  shaft;  and  it  can  be  put  down  in 
much  quicker  time.  When  it  is  once  in  contact  with  the 
oil,  operating  expenses  are  trifling,  for  in  many  cases  the 
oil  reaches  the  surface  under  natural  gas  pressure,  and  in 
others  it  has  merely  to  be  pumped.  There  are  not  the 
expenses  for  breaking  rock,  timbering,  or  haulage,  which 
are  common  in  coal  mining. 

So  that  in  addition  to  being  a  better  fuel  than  coal  to 
burn  under  a  steam  boiler,  petroleum  mining  is  as  health- 
ful and  safe  an  occupation  as  can  be  well  found  in  con- 
trast with  the  extremely  dangerous   work  of   the  coal 


RIVALS  OF  COAL  85 

miner,  and  it  can  be  far  more  quickly  and  more  cheaply 
got  out  of  the  ground. 

It  has  other  advantages. 

Coal,  bituminous  coal  especially,  is  so  bulky  and  so 
liable  to  spontaneous  combustion  that  it  is  difficult  to 
store.  Petroleum,  on  the  contrary,  can  be  easily  and 
satisfactorily  stored  in  iron  tanks  which,  standing  about 
like  great  cheese  boxes,  are  characteristic  of  the  oil- 
producing  country.  Added  to  the  advantage  of  easy 
storage  is  the  much  greater  one  of  easy  transportation. 
Unlike  coal,  the  crude  petroleum  supply  of  the  country 
makes  no  demand  upon  the  railroads.  Only  under  excep- 
tional circumstances  and  for  short  distances  is  it  hauled 
about  in  tank  cars.  It  has  its  own  independent  system  of 
pipe  lines,  after  the  manner  of  a  great  water  supply. 
These  systems  connect  the  oil  wells  with  the  refineries, 
the  markets,  and  the  seaports. 

The  pipe  lines  are  ample  to  distribute  the  current  pro- 
duction of  oil.  It  is  these  pipe  lines  that  have  not  only 
made  the  petroleum  industry  absolutely  independent  of 
the  railroads,  but  through  the  low  cost  of  their  operation 
have  lowered  the  cost  of  petroleum  products.  They  have 
also  made  it  possible  to  establish  oil  refineries  near  the 
points  of  consumption  and  have  united  widely  separated 
fields. 

For  all  these  reasons — because  it  is  a  more  efficient  fuel 
under  steam  boilers;  because  it  can  be  produced  more 
cheaply;  because  the  work  of  mining  it  is  easy  and  the 
danger  is  slight;  and  because  having  an  independent 
transportation  system  of  its  own  it  makes  no  demand 
on  the  already  overburdened  railroads — petroleum  might 
have  superseded  coal  as  the  power  that  rules  industry  if 
there  had  been  enough  of  it.    Even  as  it  is,  petroleum  has 


86  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

been  able  to  meet  a  large  part  of  the  demand  for  fuel  and 
so  stand  between  the  coal  industry  and  the  reorganization 
hanging  over  it. 

But  we  have  been,  if  possible,  more  prodigal  in  our 
exploitation  of  our  petroleum  resources  than  of  coal. 
There  was  an  immediate  market  for  all  the  petroleum  that 
could  be  produced.  The  well-owner's  chief  anxiety  was 
lest  his  neighbor,  whose  well  tapped  the  same  under- 
ground reservoir,  should  get  the  oil  out  before  he  did. 
So  the  exploiters  of  petroleum  rushed  on  their  quarry 
with  an  avidity  never  equalled  by  the  exploiters  of  coal. 
While  approximately  one-half  of  the  coal  has  been  left 
in  the  ground  through  the  eagerness  of  the  owners  to  beat 
each  other  to  market,  from  seventy  to  ninety  per  cent  of 
the  petroleum  in  the  various  fields  has  been  lost  from 
the  same  cause.  And  industry  has  seemed  to  take  it  for 
granted  that  because  petroleum  was  being  produced  so 
rapidly,  there  was  an  unlimited  supply.  In  1916,  many 
plants  shifted  from  coal  to  fuel  oil,  because  of  the  inability 
of  the  railroads  to  deliver  coal.  We  have  developed  an 
oil-burning  navy  and  are  rapidly  developing  an  oil-burn- 
ing merchant  marine.  Ships  and  factory  furnaces  are 
competing  with  the  internal-combustion  engines  of  mil- 
lions of  automobiles  and  the  hungry  lamps  of  the  country- 
side for  the  diminishing  reserves  of  petroleum.  Already 
the  supply  of  crude  petroleum  is  hard  pressed  by  the 
demand  for  fuel  oil.  Already  approximately  one-half  of 
the  original  petroleum  supply  of  the  United  States  is 
gone.  In  1918,  460,721,000  barrels  were  taken,  while  it 
was  estimated  that  6,730,000,000  barrels  remained  in  the 
ground,  and  the  production  during  the  two  subsequent 
years  was  approximately  400,000,000  barrels  annually. 
The    petroleum    reserve,    converting    barrels    into    tons. 


RIVALS  OF  COAL  87 

amounts  to  only  2/1000  of  our  reserves  of  coal.  If  we 
stopped  mining  coal  tomorrow  and  let  American  petro- 
leum take  its  place,  all  our  petroleum  resources  would  be 
exhausted  in  about  fifteen  months. 

And  even  if  the  supply  of  petroleum  were  far  less  lim- 
ited than  the  experts  estimate  it  to  be,  even  if  there  were 
enough  of  it  to  last  for  many  decades  to  come,  the  fact 
that  it  is  practically  the  one  lubricant  of  the  industrial 
world  makes  it  a  social  crime  to  burn  it  as  a  substitute  for 
coal.  Without  it,  every  railroad  wheel  would  run  hot 
and  stop;  the  great  turbines  in  our  ships  and  modern 
power  plants  move  on  bearings  that  are  smothered  in 
petroleum  oil.  And  for  petroleum  as  a  lubricant  there  is 
no  commercially  available  substitute. 

Closely  associated  with  petroleum  and  originally  de- 
rived from  it,  is  natural  gas.  There  is  no  way  of  telling 
how  great  the  supply  of  this  has  been  in  the  past,  how 
much  there  is  in  reserve,  or  what  the  present  outflow  is, 
because  the  waste  of  natural  gas  has  been  and  is  notori- 
ous. We  do  know,  however,  that  the  per  capita  consump- 
tion in  1915,  according  to  the  U.  S.  Geological  Survey, 
was  approximately  four  times  the  consumption  of  artifi- 
cial gas,  and  seven  times  that  of  the  by-product  coke-oven 
gas,  and  that  its  average  price  to  the  consumer  was  six- 
teen cents  a  thousand  cubic  feet  as  against  ninety-one 
cents  for  artificial  gas  and  ten  cents  for  coke-oven  gas. 
About  one-third  of  the  natural  gas  is  used  for  domestic 
purposes,  about  two-thirds  is  used  for  manufacture.  It  is 
conservatively  estimated  that  100,000,000  gallons  of  gaso- 
line can  be  recovered  from  it  annually  and  it  is  the  pri- 
mary source  of  the  lamp  black  from  which  all  the  print- 
ers' ink  in  present  use  is  made.  The  supply  of  natural  gas 
in  reserve  is  not  calculable,  but  since  most  of  the  wells 


88  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

show  a  diminished  flow,  it  is  believed  to  be  on  the  way  to 
exhaustion. 

Although  the  supplies  of  oil  and  gas  have  supplemented 
coal  for  half  a  century  and  protected  the  coal  industry 
from  the  same  sort  of  economic  pressure  which  has  forced 
reorganization  upon  most  other  enterprises,  the  time  is  at 
hand  when  they  can  no  longer  do  so. 

The  imaginative  appeal  of  hydroelectric  power  has 
led  many  people  to  hope  that  water-power  electricity 
would  come  to  the  aid  of  coal  and  possibly  replace  it. 
But  Mr.  Charles  P.  Steinmetz,  of  the  General  Electric 
Company,  tells  us  that  the  total  available  water  power  of 
the  United  States  has  been  variously  estimated  at  from 
fifty  to  one  hundred  million  horse-power,  that  is,  from 
one-sixth  to  one-third  of  the  horse-power  equivalent  of 
our  present  annual  coal  production.  He  has  gone  further 
and  calculated  the  maximum  possible  value  of  all  water 
power  beyond  which  the  ultimate  skill  of  invention  could 
never  possibly  go.  If  every  raindrop  which  falls  any- 
where in  the  United  States,  allowing  only  for  the  amount 
of  water  needed  by  agriculture  and  the  loss  due  to  seepage 
and  evaporation,  were  collected  and  all  the  power  which 
it  could  develop  in  its  journey  to  the  sea  were  efficiently 
utilized,  the  resultant  energy  would  amount  to  just  about 
the  same  as  the  total  which  we  get  out  of  our  present  coal 
consumption  for  all  purposes.  Water  power — hydro- 
electric energy — can  never  replace  coal. 

The  waste  of  both  petroleum  and  gas  has  been  largely 
due  to  the  unrestrained  acquisitive  instinct  seeking  quick 
wealth  in  response  to  the  cry  of  the  steam  engine  for  more 
and  more  fuel.  They  were  drafted  into  service  because 
they  could  do  the  work  of  coal  and  do  it  more  efficiently. 
But  their  diminishing  supply  makes  it  impossible  for  them 


RIVALS  OF  COAL  89 

longer  to  stave  off  the  impending  technical  revolution  in 
the  coal  industry.  The  miners  are  growing  restive  under 
the  evils  of  intermittent  employment,  uncertain  income, 
and  demoralizing  conditions  of  living.  The  public  begins 
to  rebel  against  irregularity  of  supply  and  ruinously  high 
prices.  The  antiquated  transportation  system  creaks  and 
staggers  under  a  load  which  the  advance  of  technical 
science  makes  it  unnecessary  for  it  longer  to  carry. 

All  these,  taken  together  with  the  still-increasing  de- 
mand for  power  to  drive  on  production  and  pile  up  a 
surplus  on  which  to  base  an  advancing  civilization,  are 
forcing  a  new  technical  revolution  upon  the  coal  industry. 


CHAPTER  IX 
The  Technical  Revolution 

The  economic  surplus  which  the  industrial  revolution 
of  the  latter  eighteenth  century  created  was  the  product  of 
a  crude,  extensive  exploitation  of  our  natural  resources. 
With  the  aid  of  the  steam  engine  men  skimmed  the  cream 
of  the  mines,  the  forests,  and  the  new  soil  of  the  Ameri- 
can continent. 

The  wasteful  use  of  our  coal,  paralleling  as  it  did  our 
increasing  need  for  power,  was  hampering  the  industries 
of  the  country  even  before  the  war.  After  the  breaking 
out  of  the  conflict  the  overwhelming  pressure  for  in- 
creased production  could  not  be  met.  In  a  panic  we 
pushed  our  old  methods  of  coal  exploitation  further  than 
ever  before,  drew  on  our  oil  and  gas  supplies  to  the 
utmost,  and  then  in  final  desperation  integrated  the  admin- 
istrative side  of  the  coal  industry  through  the  Fuel 
Administration. 

The  relief  this  brought  was  immediate,  although  the 
chief  work  of  the  Fuel  Administration  was  merely  to 
systematize  and  coordinate  the  distribution  of  coal  so 
that  those  who  must  have  it  would  get  it.  For  during 
wartime  the  factories  must  run,  and  the  autocratic  inte- 
gration which  the  Fuel  Administration  accomplished 
created  a  seeming  abundance  by  keeping  the  factory 
wheels  of  at  least  the  essential  industries  turning. 

But  the  relief  was  only  apparent — not  actual.     When 


THE  TECHNICAL  REVOLUTION  91 

the  tumult  of  the  war  was  over  and  we  were  back  in  still 
water,  Secretary  Lane  announced  that  the  enormous  de- 
velopment of  war  industries  had  created  an  almost  in- 
satiable demand  for  power — a  demand  that  was  over- 
reaching the  available  supply  with  such  rapidity  that  had 
hostilities  continued,  it  is  certain  that  by  1920  we  should 
have  been  facing  an  extreme  power  shortage.  Inte- 
grated administration  had  done  all  it  could  but  the  prob- 
lem of  power  to  advance  civilization — to  build  up  a  sur- 
plus through  production — to  give  all  men  the  chance  of 
the  good  life,  was  still  unsolved.  Just  as  the  integration 
by  the  Fuel  Administration  had  deferred  the  acute  power 
shortage  during  the  war,  so  the  business  depression  that 
followed  the  signing  of  the  armistice  is  still  holding  it  in 
check.  And  yet  if  civilization  is  to  go  on,  our  multitudi- 
nous factory  wheels  must  turn  again  more  swiftly  and  in 
increasing  number,  our  looms  must  weave  more  and  more 
cloth,  and  new  cars  and  new  ships  must  carry  new  mil- 
lions of  people  to  and  fro.  As  yet  we  know  no  other 
material  means  through  which  to  build  up  the  good  life 
than  these  whirling  wheels. 

The  technical  experts  have  agreed  that  the  problem 
must  be  solved  through  the  integration  of  all  our  sources 
of  fuel  and  power  which  they,  like  the  Fuel  Administra- 
tion during  the  war,  regard  as  a  common  reservoir  Hke 
the  water  supply  of  a  modern  community,  and  through 
the  reduction  of  both  coal  and  water  power  to  terms  of 
their  common  denominator,  electricity.  As  the  result  of 
Secretary  Lane's  prevision  of  the  impending  power  short- 
age. Congress  in  1921  made  an  appropriation  for  a  pre- 
liminary survey  by  the  technical  experts  of  the  power 
resources  along  the  Atlantic  seaboard  from  Washington 
to  Boston  and  for  one  hundred  and  fifty  miles  inland. 


92  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

This  territory  has  been  called  the  "finishing  shop"  of 
America.  It  is  of  irregular  coast  line,  giving  good  har- 
bors for  the  shipping  to  carry  its  products  overseas;  its 
swift  streams  turned  the  first  factory  wheels  in  America; 
its  mountain  ranges  are  full  of  metals  and  easily  accessible 
coal ;  and  to  this  region  the  industrially  trained  peoples  of 
Europe  most  naturally  come.  Obviously  its  factory 
wheels  must  turn. 

As  a  result  of  the  survey  of  this  region,  engineers  have 
worked  out  what  is  called  the  Superpower  Plan.  Accord- 
ing to  this,  a  giant  network  of  wire  will  be  woven  over  the 
territory  between  the  Alleghenies  and  the  Atlantic  sea- 
board and  charged  with  the  very  essence  of  power.  Great 
steel  towers,  like  those  that  now  carry  the  currents  gen- 
erated at  Niagara  Falls,  the  Keokuk  Dam  on  the  Missis- 
sippi, and  the  Roosevelt  Dam  at  the  head  of  Salt  River 
in  the  Arizona  Desert,  will  stride  through  the  valleys  and 
across  the  mountains  along  a  two-hundred- foot  right  of 
way.  Instead  of  steel  rails  and  puffing  engines  to  convey 
industrial  power,  there  will  be  only  towers  and  copper 
wires.  Instead  of  millions  of  tons  of  raw  coal  moving 
slowly  along  through  bottle  necks  in  the  mountains  and 
through  congested  freight  yards,  there  will  be  the  silent 
rush  of  uncounted  electrons  hurrying  to  the  centers  of 
production  to  do  the  work  of  man.  Instead  of  spreading 
dirt  and  noise  and  ugliness,  these  new  carriers  of  cosmic 
energy  will  be  high  harps  for  the  wind. 

According  to  this  plan  of  the  Superpower  Commission 
the  main  line  of  this  new  power  system  begins  at  Wash- 
ington and  follows  the  coast  through  the  great  centers  of 
population — Baltimore,  Wilmington,  Philadelphia,  New- 
ark, New  York,  New  Haven,  Providence,  Boston,  and  on 
up  to  Newburyport.     Stretching  away  from  this  main 


THE  TECHNICAL  REVOLUTION  93 

line  two  principal  inland  lines  are  projected,  one  swinging 
off  at  Baltimore  out  to  Harrisburg  and  up  the  anthracite 
valley  to  Scranton;  another  leaving  the  main  line  just 
before  it  reaches  New  York  and  stretching  up  the  Hudson 
Valley  to  Poughkeepsie,  Port  Jervis,  and  Utica,  tapping 
the  hydroelectric  generating  stations  in  the  Adiron- 
dacks,  and  connecting  again  through  Pittsfield,  North- 
ampton, and  Worcester  with  the  main  line  in  Boston. 
North  and  south  cross  lines  mesh  these  secondary  lines 
with  the  main  line  along  the  coast — one  through  Hart- 
ford and  Waterbury  to  New  Haven,  and  another  from 
Worcester  to  Providence,  with  a  short  branch  line  to 
New  Bedford.  Back  and  forth  across  this  network  of 
high-tension  wires  will  run  the  power  to  turn  the  factory 
wheels. 

About  nine-tenths  of  this  power  will  be  the  developed 
energy  of  coal.  The  Superpower  Commission's  plan 
calls  for  the  establishment  of  great  steam-generating 
plants  near  the  mines  where  the  coal  will  be  used  to  fire 
steam  engines  which  will  turn  dynamos  and  so  convert 
the  energy  of  coal  into  electricity  and  feed  it  to  that  great 
harp  in  the  wind.  Steam-generating  plants  to  supply 
more  distant  consumers  are  projected  at  tidewater — that 
is  at  places  to  which  coal  can  be  delivered  by  coastwise 
steamers.  Incidentally  these  tidewater  plants  involve  a 
considerable  amount  of  coal  haulage  from  the  mines  to 
the  seaports,  and  from  the  ports  nearest  the  mines  to  the 
other  ports  along  the  coast;  from  the  lower  West  Vir- 
ginia fields,  across  the  mountains,  to  the  southern  end  of 
Chesapeake  Bay  and  thence  by  boat  northward  along  the 
coast  to  Connecticut,  Rhode  Island,  Massachusetts,  and 
New  Hampshire.  En  route  this  coal  will  be  joined  by 
other  coal  from  the  upper  West  Virginia  and  the  lower 


94  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

Pennsylvania  bituminous  fields  and  also  by  coal  from  the 
middle  Pennsylvania  field  which  will  have  to  be  freighted 
through  New  Jersey  to  the  Hudson  ports,  then  again  up 
Long  Island  Sound  by  steamdrawn  barges.  While  great 
economies  would  be  effected  by  the  transformation  of  coal 
into  electric  energy  at  the  superpower  stations,  both  at 
the  mines  and  at  the  tidewater  ports,  the  plan  of  the 
Superpower  Commission  still  involves  the  necessity  of 
hauling  millions  of  tons  of  raw  coal  from  the  mines  to 
seaboard.  This  limitation  the  Commission  held  to  be 
necessary,  not  only  for  the  purpose  of  utilizing  the  com- 
paratively small  plants  which  existing  public  utility  com- 
panies have  already  built,  but  because  at  the  time  their 
report  was  made  the  electrical  engineers  had  not  yet  per- 
fected means  of  transporting  electricity  for  long  distances 
without  great  leakage  on  the  way.  Since  the  Commis- 
sion's survey  was  published,  however,  an  invention  has 
been  announced  which  greatly  increases  the  distance  over 
which  the  high-voltage  currents  can  be  efficiently  sent, 
so  that  it  is  now  feasible  to  transmute  a  much  larger  pro- 
portion of  coal  into  electricity  at  the  mine.  The  plan  for 
practically  all  the  tidewater  generating  plants  can  be 
given  up,  together  with  the  long,  slow,  costly  process  of 
carrying  coal  to  them,  and  that  ninety  per  cent  of  the 
electricity  for  the  superpower  system  which  is  derived 
from  coal  can  be  generated  directly  at  the  mine. 

The  other  ten  per  cent  according  to  the  Commission's 
plan  will  be  hydroelectric  power.  Generating  stations  are 
to  be  established  at  the  rapids  of  the  Potomac  just  above 
Washington ;  along  the  lower  reaches  of  the  Susquehanna 
in  Pennsylvania  and  Maryland;  along  the  upper  courses 
of  the  Delaware  and  the  Hudson;  in  the  Adirondacks; 
and  at  intervals  along  the  whole  length  of  the  Connecticut 


THE  TECHNICAL  REVOLUTION  95 

River.  But  the  main  dependence  of  the  projected  super- 
power system  is  still  the  bituminous  coal  supply  which  it 
is  planned  to  keep  at  its  old  job  of  raising  steam  to  drive 
the  turbine  engines  which  will  in  turn  drive  the  electric 
dynamos. 

Besides  the  Commission's  superpower  plan  for  the 
Atlantic  seaboard,  other  power  systems  have  been 
sketched  out,  one  centering  around  Helena  in  southern 
Illinois  and  designed  to  serve  most  of  the  Mississippi 
Valley,  jone  near  the  northwest  coast,  another  in  Cali- 
•fdrilia.-    ' 

The  integration  of  water  and  coal  is  a  long  step  toward 
the  solution  of  the  power  problem,  in  that  it  not  only 
brings  a  new  force  to  supplement  the  coal  supply  but  also 
saves  the  coal  now  used  by  steam  locomotives  to  haul  raw 
fuel  to  its  millions  of  consumers.  Moreover,  it  contem- 
plates the  electrification  of  all  the  railroads  within  the 
zone  whose  traffic  is  heavy  enough  to  warrant  it,  and  as 
it  is  estimated  that  two  pounds  of  coal  applied  to  an  elec- 
tric locomotive  will  do  as  much  work  as  seven  and  one- 
half  to  eight  and  one-half  pounds  when  applied  to  a  steam 
locomotive,  the  amount  of  coal  now  used  for  transporta- 
tion will  be  still  further  reduced.  Through  such  begin- 
nings as  these  projected  superpower  systems  must  come 
the  comprehensive  integration  of  the  industry. 

But  the  Federal  Commission's  superpower  plan  as  pub- 
lished is  only  a  beginning.  It  is  not  enough  merely  to 
save  the  energy  of  coal,  to  relieve  the  congestion  on  the 
freight  railroads,  and  to  provide  a  common-carrier  system 
for  high-voltage  electricity.  There  is  needed  also  the  more 
intensive  utilization  of  the  fuel  supply.  The  plan  of  the 
Superpower  Commission  regards  coal — bituminous  coal 
especially — as  nothing  more  than  fuel.     The  industrial 


96  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

revolution  was  built  upon  the  power  of  coal  to  fire  the 
boilers  in  steam  engines.  But  the  use  of  coal  for  the 
generation  of  steam  only  is  almost  the  least  efficient  way 
in  which  it  can  be  utilized.  From  the  point  of  view  of 
national  economy  the  better  utiHzation  of  what  are  known 
as  the  by-product  values  of  bituminous  coal  is  quite  as 
important  as  the  establishment  of  an  integrated  power 
system. 

For  coal  is  much  more  than  potential  power.  Bitumi- 
nous coal  is  the  source  of  many  of  our  most  valuable 
mineral  products  and  yet  today,  of  the  more  than  500,- 
000,000  tons  annually  produced,  almost  all  is  used  ex- 
clusively for  the  production  of  power  and  all  of  its  ingre- 
dients except  the  heat-producing  elements  are  wasted. 
About  one-twelfth  of  the  bituminous  coal — that  which  is 
now  used  for  the  production  of  coke  in  ovens  that  recover 
its  by-product — must  be  excepted  from  this  statement. 
Moreover,  the  90,000,000  tons  of  anthracite  mined  every 
year  are  economically  used  because  anthracite  contains 
practically  nothing  but  carbon  and  ash  and  its  direct 
burning  is  the  most  efficient  way  in  which  it  can  be  used 
if  its  energy  content  is  thoroughly  conserved.  Omitting, 
then,  the  whole  of  the  anthracite  supply,  and  that  bitumi- 
nous which  is  already  properly  utilized,  we  still  have  more 
than  400,000,000  tons  wastefully  used  every  year — so 
wastefully  that  not  only  are  all  its  commodity  values 
destroyed,  but  its  primary  purpose  of  creating  heat  and 
industrial  power  is  imperfectly  served.  In  the  effective 
integration  of  fuel  and  power  it  will  become  necessary  to 
separate  the  energy-producing  elements  in  bituminous 
coal — and  also  of  the  sub-bituminous  coal,  of  lignite  and 
peat,  of  which  we  have  reserves  amounting  to  the  billions 
of  tons — from  those  which  have  only  a  commodity  value. 


THE  TECHNICAL  REVOLUTION  97 

In  their  report  made  for  the  Smithsonian  Institution, 
Gilbert  and  Pogue  point  out  that  "there  are  in  one  ton 
of  good  bituminous  coal,  fifteen  hundred  pounds  of 
smokeless  fuel  analogous  to  anthracite,  ten  thousand  cubic 
feet  of  gas,  twenty-two  pounds  of  ammonium  sulphate, 
two  and  one-half  gallons  of  benzol,  and  nine  gallons  of 
tar"  and  that  lignite  gives  almost  as  much  of  these  com- 
modities. Apart  from  the  fuel  values  represented  by  the 
"smokeless  fuel  analogous  to  anthracite"  the  gas  and 
benzol,  the  ammonium  sulphate,  and  tar  have  unique 
values  as  fertilizers,  and  the  source  of  those  mineral 
elements  from  which  our  dyes  and  a  large  part  of  our 
modern  medicines  are  made.  The  process  used  to  extract 
these  commodity  values  is  similar  to  that  which  nature 
used  in  making  anthracite,  except  that  the  volatile  matter 
which  the  geological  revolution  drove  off  into  the  air  is 
collected  and  utilized. 

The  gas  created  by  the  process  can  be  delivered  by  pipe 
lines  over  practically  any  distance  to  the  centers  of  con- 
sumption, or,  with  the  help  of  the  internal-combustion 
engine,  converted  into  electrical  energy  at  the  mine.  Gas 
as  a  fuel  has  the  great  advantage  that  it  eliminates  both 
storage  and  haulage,  and  produces  the  same  amount  of 
heat  from  about  one-half  the  amount  of  coal,  and  since  it 
can  be  produced  as  needed  all  the  year  round  it  will  go 
far  to  eliminate  the  seasonal  character  of  coal  mining. 
Moreover,  wherever  heat  rather  than  light  or  power  is 
desired,  gas^  in  the  present  state  of  technical  develop- 
ment, is  even  more  economical  than  electricity.  Under 
the  by-product  system  the  present  annual  coal  output  can 
be  made  to  more  than  double  its  service  in  driving  ma- 
chinery and  in  addition  it  can  be  made  to  contribute 
heavily  to  our  supply  of  fertilizers,  motor  fuel,  and  chemi- 


98  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

cal  products.  It  is  estimated  that  the  aggregate  loss 
resulting  from  the  present  wasteful  utilization  of  coal  is 
over  ten  dollars  a  year  for  each  inhabitant  of  the  United 
States. 

The  by-products  of  coal  can  play  an  important  part  in 
the  fuel  industry.  Where  it  is  thoroughly  integrated  they 
can  help  in  financing  the  development  of  hydroelectricity 
to  supplement  the  electricity  produced  from  coal.  For 
while  the  running  expenses  of  a  hydroelectric  plant  are 
little  more  than  the  interest  on  the  capital  invested,  the 
amount  of  that  capital  is  large.  Also  the  establishment  of 
gas  plants  at  the  mines  is  a  costly  thing.  The  temptation 
is  to  revamp  and  repair  and  reorganize  the  present  out- 
worn and  wasteful  system  rather  than  make  large  new  "^ 
investments  and  scrap  the  old  equipment.  But  in  the 
commercial  value  of  the  by-products  from  bituminous 
coal  lies  the  possibility  of  paying  for  the  new  power  to 
turn  our  factory  wheels  by  the  sale  of  dyes  and  fertilizer 
and  medicines  and  tar  and  explosives  and  perfumes  and  a 
hundred  other  things.  So  it  is  to  the  chemical  labora- 
tories that  we  look  for  the  new  values  which  may  make 
a  superpower  system  financially  possible  just  as  it  is  to 
the  electrical  workshop  that  we  look  for  the  inventions 
which  will  integrate  it  into  one  thing. 

But  even  the  recovery  and  sale  of  the  by-products  of 
coal  are  not  all  that  is  involved  in  the  new  way  of  supply- 
ing the  world  with  power.  While  gas  can  yield  the  full 
fuel  value  of  coal  in  a  more  efficient  form  than  solid  fuel, 
as  well  as  all  the  commodity  values,  if  it  is  converted  into 
power  through  the  steam  engine,  at  least  one-half  of  its 
energy  value  is  lost.  To  conserve  its  full  value,  gas  must 
be  burned  in  the  internal-combustion  engine,  the  most 
familiar  type  of  which  is  the  one  we  know  under  the  hood 


THE  TECHNICAL  REVOLUTION  99 

of  the  automobile  and  the  most  efficient  type  is  the  Diesel 
engine  which  has  made  the  by-product  system  industrially 
practical. 

The  internal-combustion  engine  is  a  relatively  simple 
device  for  transforming  the  energy  in  fuel  into  power 
directly  instead  of  indirectly  as  the  steam  engine  does,  of 
turning  wheels  at  first  hand,  of  cutting  out  steam  as  a 
middleman.  It  greatly  enlarges  the  range  of  fuel  utiliza- 
tion because  it  can  burn  not  only  fuel  gas  and  the  lighter 
oils — gasoline,  benzol,  and  their  close  kin — but  also  fuel 
alcohol,  the  supply  of  which  though  hitherto  only  slightly 
developed  will  last  as  long  as  the  sun  and  rain  make  vege- 
tation grow  in  the  soil.  Our  future  success  in  winning 
and  holding  an  economic  surplus  upon  which  the  oppor- 
tunity for  the  good  life  and  a  world  civilization  depends, 
rests  almost  as  largely  upon  the  internal-combustion 
engine  as  the  industrial  revolution  depended  upon  the 
steam  engine  of  Newcomen  and  Watt. 

When  the  internal-combustion  engine  has  been  ade- 
quately developed,  and  that  time  is  near  at  hand,  it  will 
be  economically  possible  to  establish  the  great  super- 
power stations  at  the  mines,  to  integrate  the  electricity 
flowing  from  their  gas-driven  dynamos  with  the  flow 
from  the  hydroelectric  stations  on  the  great  rivers  and 
mountain  streams,  and  to  use  the  surplus  gas  and  smoke- 
less coal  to  supply  the  domestic  consumer  during  the 
period  of  transition  from  our  present  wasteful  fuel  and 
power  system  to  the  new  system  which  will  give  us  heat 
and  power  with  the  turn  of  a  button  on  an  electric  switch. 

In  our  solution  of  the  fuel  problem  there  must  be  an 
extension  of  such  work  as  that  of  the  Fuel  Administra- 
tion which  integrated  the  administrative  side  of  the  indus- 
try as  by  a  man  in  a  high  tower  with  all  the  resources  and 


100  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

needs  of  the  country  spread  beneath  him.  He  must  see 
all  the  sources  of  power  as  in  a  common  reservoir — all 
the  coal  and  oil  and  gas  and  water  power — all  the  fuel 
alcohol  and  those  subtle  forces  within  the  material  atoms 
themselves  which  scientists  dream  of  forcing  to  do  the 
work  of  man.  He  must  sort  and  deliver  power  to  fill  the 
need,  this  in  the  form  of  oil  or  gas  sent  through  its  own 
pipe  line;  this  still  in  the  bulky  form  of  coal  or  coke  by 
rail  or  water  to  those  few  industries  which  can  take  no 
substitute ;  and  more  and  more  of  it  transmuted  into  elec- 
tricity and  poured  along  the  singing  wires,  or  later  per- 
haps through  the  pathways  of  the  air  itself,  to  turn  the 
wheels  of  industry. 

And  in  addition  to  the  actual  pooling  of  the  power 
resources  of  the  country,  there  must  come  their  intensive 
and  economical  use — economical  by  more  standards  than 
that  of  money  alone — so  that  the  miner  who  blasts  the 
coal  from  the  face,  the  man  who  sinks  the  oil  well  or  runs 
the  internal-combustion  engine  or  strings  the  electric 
wires,  will  get  in  return  for  the  thousands  of  tons  of  coal 
he  has  mined  or  the  kilowatt  hours  he  has  generated  from 
his  dynamo,  the  material  basis  of  the  good  life. 

This  integrated  industry  of  which  the  mining  of  coal, 
the  projected  superpower  systems,  the  pumping  of  oil, 
the  development  of  water  power,  and  the  organization  and 
training  of  those  who  produce  or  consume  power  are 
essential  parts,  is  the  inevitable  result  of  the  development 
that  has  gone  before.  Just  as  the  industrial  revolution 
had  its  beginnings  in  the  coordination  of  the  steam  en- 
gine, the  coal  mines,  and  the  factory  machinery,  and  its 
incentive  in  the  drive  of  the  acquisitive  instinct  to  make 
existence  possible;  so  this  new  industrial  advance,  the 
integration  of  the  power  that  drives  industry,  is  the  logical 


THE  TECHNICAL  REVOLUTION  101 

result  of  the  development  of  long-distance  electric  trans- 
mission, the  intense  utilization  of  the  fuel  supply,  and  the 
invention  of  the  internal-combustion  engine,  and  it  may- 
result  not  only  in  making  existence  possible  but  in  making 
life  good. 


CHAPTER  X 

The  Strait  Gate 

Since  the  days  when  the  cosmic  energy  of  coal  was  first 
harnessed  to  the  looms  of  England,  mechanical  contriv- 
ances of  almost  miraculous  ingenuity  have  followed  one 
another  in  such  rapid  succession  that  men  have  come  to 
place  undue  reliance  upon  machinery  for  the  solution  of 
the  difficult  human  problems  that  impede  progress  toward 
the  good  life  and  a  worthy  civilization.  Just  as  the  earlier 
generations  failed  in  the  spiritual  preparedness  necessary 
to  the  conversion  of  the  technical  triumphs  of  Newcomen 
and  Watt,  Fulton  and  Stephenson,  and  a  host  of  others 
to  the  higher  ends  of  civilization,  so  our  generation  shows 
a  similar  disposition  to  rely  upon  the  wonder  workers  of 
mechanical  science  to  save  us  from  the  disastrous  conse- 
quences of  muddling  along  in  the  field  of  human  relations 
whether  in  industry,  in  the  nation,  or  among  the  nations. 
But  the  good  life  is  not  to  be  won  by  mechanical  inven- 
tion alone.  One  of  the  outstanding  lessons  of  the  World 
War  was  that  great  inventions  in  the  realm  of  the  physi- 
cal and  chemical  sciences  may  be  destructive  of  the  very 
civilization  which  it  is  their  higher  mission  to  serve.  Un- 
less we  have  the  spiritual  capacity  to  make  the  technique 
of  science  obedient  to  the  commandment  to  love  our 
neighbor  as  ourselves,  superpower  systems,  high-voltage 
transmission,  the  internal-combustion  engine,  may  again 
intensify  the  exploitation  of  man  by  man,  the  clash  of 


THE  STRAIT  GATE  103 

groups  for  power,  the  brutality  of  international  wars  for 
possession. 

We  men  and  women  of  the  twentieth  century  have 
developed  a  complacent  habit  of  priding  ourselves  upon 
our  scientific  open-mindedness,  our  respect  for  facts,  our 
eagerness  to  accept  the  revelations  of  authentic  scientific 
investigation  and  experiment.  As  we  mount  into  the 
clouds  on  the  wings  of  the  aeroplane  or  catch  the  voice  of 
the  radio  operator  out  of  ethereal  space,  we  have  a  tre- 
mendous sense  of  intellectual  emancipation,  a  thrill  of 
escape  from  ancient  bigotries  and  superstitions.  There  is 
some  warrant  for  this  self-congratulatory  attitude  in  so 
far  as  it  relates  to  the  physical  sciences.  We  have  reason 
to  be  proud  that  we  have  banished  the  primitive  fears 
that  led  an  earher  age  to  persecute  men  like  Galileo  for 
telling  the  truth  with  respect  to  the  place  of  the  earth  in 
the  stellar  universe.  We  are  sufficiently  emancipated  to 
know  that  the  inventors  of  the  dynamo,  the  turbine 
engine,  the  spectroscope,  wireless  telegraphy,  and  high- 
voltage  electrical  transmission  are  not  guilty  of  heresy. 
When  Steinmetz  forges  a  thunderbolt  and  sends  it  crash- 
ing across  his  laboratory,  we  do  not  burn  him  for  witch- 
craft. The  inquirers  into  the  nature  of  the  atom,  the 
structure  of  the  cerebral  ganglia,  or  the  chemical  compo- 
sition of  the  nebulae  in  the  Milky  Way  are  free  from 
medieval  taboos. 

But  unfortunately  we  have  not  developed  an  equally 
enlightened  attitude  toward  the  inquirers  into  the  nature 
of  human  relations  in  politics  or  industry,  or  toward  those 
who  would  apply  the  experimental  method  to  the  develop- 
ment and  scientific  reconstruction  of  industrial  or  political 
government.  Terms  like  trusts,  the  money  power,  trade 
unions,  industrial  autocracy,  collective  bargaining,  social- 


104  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

ism,  holshevism,  private  monopoly,  public  ownership,  stir 
all  our  ancient  fears,  resentments,  and  hates.  Men  may 
be  unorthodox  in  the  physical  sciences;  we  are  growing 
tolerant  of  unorthodoxy  in  religious  opinion.  But  un- 
orthodoxy  in  the  realm  of  politics  is  still  frowned  upon. 
We  still  imprison  men  for  their  political  and  economic 
opinions  when  they  challenge  the  finality  of  accepted 
institutions  and  especially  when  they  advocate  the  funda- 
mental reconstruction  of  accepted  forms  of  political  and 
economic  government.  Yet  it  is  quite  as  true  in  the  realm 
of  human  relations,  as  in  that  of  the  physical  sciences,  that 
the  truth  and  the  truth  only  can  make  us  free.  Human 
brotherhood  can  be  achieved  only  through  human  under- 
standing. 

It  is  a  commonplace  to  say  that  the  vigorous  growth 
of  democracy  depends  upon  education.  But  much  repeti- 
tion has  dulled  the  vital  implications  of  the  assertion.  We 
tend  to  forget  that  a  democracy  that  permits  essential 
knowledge  to  be  withheld  from  general  circulation  digs 
its  own  grave;  that  while  men  talk  of  emancipation  and 
freedom,  ignorance  may  forge  chains  for  their  enslave- 
ment. When  any  group  within  the  community  is  per- 
mitted to  treat  facts  essential  to  the  development  of  right 
human  relations  as  "trade  secrets,"  education  itself  be- 
comes stereotyped  and  sterile.  Text-books  and  "lessons" 
become  spiritually  and  intellectually  empty,  like  the 
prayers  which  certain  Eastern  cults  pin  to  wheels  that 
spin  idly  in  the  wind. 

The  authentic  prophets  of  democracy  have  constantly 
striven  to  keep  the  channels  of  popular  education  free 
from  the  clogging  muck  of  selfishness,  superstition,  and 
prejudice.  They  have  had  faith  in  the  essential  justice 
and  ultimate  wisdom  of  informed  public  opinion.     Such 


THE  STRAIT  GATE  105 

men  have  appeared  in  government,  among  the  coal 
owners,  among  the  miners,  who  are  the  commoners  of 
the  coal  industry. 

In  1914  the  coal  operators  of  Illinois  and  Indiana  issued 
a  Statement  of  Facts  for  the  enlightenment  of  the  Gov- 
ernment and  the  people.  The  normal  state  of  the  coal 
industry,  they  declared,  was  such  as  to  "endanger  the 
lives  of  the  miners,  waste  the  coal  reserves,  and  deprive 
the  operators  of  any  hope  of  profit."  They  therefore 
appealed  for  "appropriate  and  definite  governmental  con- 
trol" to  the  extent  "at  least  of  permitting  all  their  activi- 
ties to  be  known  to  the  public."  They  thus  approved  of 
the  action  of  Congress  in  creating  the  Federal  Trade  Com- 
mission "to  gather  and  compile  information  concerning, 
and  to  investigate  from  time  to  time  the  organization, 
business,  conduct,  practices,  and  management  of  any  cor- 
poration engaged  in  commerce.  .  .  .  and  to  make  public 
from  time  to  time  such  portions  of  the  information 
obtained  by  it,  except  trade  secrets  and  names  of  cus- 
tomers, as  it  shall  deem  expedient  in  the  public  interest." 
The  coal  operators  went  further  than  Congress  since  they 
made  no  reservations  with  respect  to  trade  secrets.  But 
after  the  armistice,  the  organized  operators  of  the  nation, 
through  one  of  their  members,  secured  an  injunction  re- 
straining the  Federal  Trade  Commission  from  prosecut- 
ing its  work  of  investigation  and  publicity,  the  effect  of 
which  was  to  render  the  Federal  Trade  Commission  Act 
null  and  void  so  far  as  the  education  of  the  public  with 
respect  to  the  coal  industry  was  concerned.  In  the  lan- 
guage of  a  senator,  this  action  "tied  the  Government's 
hands  and  poked  out  its  eyes." 

With  a  view  to  remedying  certain  of  the  major  evils 
that  interfered  with  the  service  of  the  coal  industry  to 


106  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

the  nation,  Senators  Calder,  Frelinghuysen,  and  Kenyon 
introduced  bills  and  conducted  public  hearings.  They  had 
concluded  that  what  Congress  and  the  public  needed  to 
know  if  they  were  to  legislate  fairly  and  intelligently  was 
the  full  truth  about  "ownership,  production,  distribution, 
stocks,  investments,  costs,  sales,  margins,  and  profits  in 
the  coal  industry  and  trade."  But  in  1921,  the  organized 
operators  of  the  country,  feeling  that  they  could  conduct 
the  industry  most  successfully  without  governmental 
supervision  or  the  scrutiny  of  informed  public  opinion, 
opposed  all  attempts  at  legislation  designed  to  accomplish 
the  precise  ends  which  in  1914  the  operators  of  Illinois 
and  Indiana  regarded  as  essential  to  the  best  interests  of 
all  concerned.  In  reviewing  the  history  of  the  efforts 
which  he  and  his  colleagues  had  made  to  get  at  and  pub- 
lish the  facts,  Senator  Frelinghuysen  reported  to  Con- 
gress that  "though  we  made  every  concession  that  we  felt 
justified  in  making,  we  find,  after  two  years  of  conference 
and  the  price  of  coal  still  high,  that  practically  all  of  these 
operators,  organized  and  unorganized,  are  bitterly  op- 
posing the  principle  of  these  two  bills — first,  the  season 
freight  rate  bill,  and  second  the  bill  'to  aid  in  stabilizing 
the  coal  industry' — and  have  organized  an  elaborate 
propaganda  with  a  view  to  bringing  about  their  de- 
feat. .  ,  .  The  National  Coal  Association  has  been  the 
chief  defender  of  the  coal  trade  since  I  became  interested 
in  the  subject.  .  .  .  For  a  time  I  looked  upon  the  men  of 
this  organization  as  fair  and  reasonable  and  I  sympa- 
thized with  their  demand  that  the  coal  trade  be  permitted 
to  work  out  its  own  salvation  without  Government  inter- 
ference, provided  full  statistics  were  obtainable  regarding 
cost  of  production,  transportation,  and  delivery  to  the 
humblest  consumer.     For  a  time  they  seemed  willing  to 


THE  STRAIT  GATE  107 

concede  this.  But  I  am  finally  and  reluctantly  convinced 
that  my  hope  in  that  direction  has  always  been  a  delu- 
sion." 

After  devoting  two  years  to  a  vain  attempt  to  get  at 
"full  statistics,"  Senator  Frelinghuysen  lost  patience  with 
the  operators.  But  he  forgot  that  many  of  their  leaders 
still  sincerely  adhere  to  Mr.  Baer's  faith  that  God  has  en- 
trusted the  interests  of  the  community  to  the  owners  of 
property  and  that  congressional  interference,  even  when 
limited  to  the  ascertainment  of  statistics,  is  subversive  not 
only  of  the  status  of  the  owners  as  trustees  of  the  nation's 
fuel  resources,  but  also  of  the  public  interest  itself.  This 
conviction  of  the  operators  is  a  fact  that  must  be  weighed 
without  impatience  like  any  fact  in  chemistry  or  physics. 

The  position  of  many  labor  leaders  is  fundamentally  the 
same  as  that  of  the  operators.  They  have  the  traditional 
fear  of  the  autocratic  power  which  they  believe  to  be 
inherent  in  the  state.  Like  the  operators,  they  are  con- 
vinced that  the  public  interest  is  best  served  when  each 
and  all  of  the  groups  within  industry  are  left  free  to  pur- 
sue their  special  interests  with  utmost  aggressiveness,  on 
the  theory  that  the  clash  of  many  selfishnesses  results,  as 
by  a  law  of  nature,  in  the  neutralization  of  selfishness  and 
its  conversion  into  public  advantage.  It  is  Utopian  folly, 
they  say,  to  attempt  to  change  "human  nature,"  the  domi- 
nant characteristic  of  which  they  hold  to  be  the  acquisi- 
tive instinct,  and  equally  vain  to  attempt  to  modify  the 
natural  operation  of  the  "law  of  supply  and  demand," 
which,  in  their  judgment,  transcends  the  "idealistic"  law 
of  service.  They  agree  that  it  is  unfortunate  that  this 
should  be  so,  but  since  it  is  so,  does  it  not  behoove  prac- 
tical men  to  act  accordingly  ?    There  are  many  men  of  this 


108  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

mind  among  the  leaders  and  rank  and  file  of  the  miners, 
as  well  as  among  the  operators. 

But  the  creative  impulse  back  of  the  organized  labor 
movement  is  by  virtue  of  necessity  the  democratic  im- 
pulse, and  where  the  democratic  impulse  is  vigorous  it 
feeds  upon  the  consciousness  of  kind  whose  principal 
channel  of  growth  is  knowledge.  In  their  national  con- 
vention, held  in  Cleveland,  Ohio,  in  1919,  the  miners 
adopted  a  resolution  calling  upon  the  Government, 
"through  Act  of  Congress,  to  acquire  title  to  the  coal 
properties  within  the  United  States  now  owned  by  private 
interests ;  by  purchasing  said  properties  at  a  figure  repre- 
senting the  actual  valuation  of  said  properties,  as  deter- 
mined upon  investigation  by  accredited  agents  of  the 
federal  Government."  They  asked  that  "the  coal  mining 
industry  be  operated  by  the  federal  Government  and  that 
the  miners  be  given  equal  representation  upon  such  coun- 
cils or  commissions  as  may  be  delegated  the  authority  to 
administer  the  affairs  of  the  coal  mining  industry.  .  .  ." 
The  stated  object  of  the  resolution  was  to  secure  the 
operation  of  the  industry  "in  the  interest  of,  and  for  the 
use  and  comfort  of  all  of  the  people  of  the  common- 
wealth .  .  ."  and  "to  prevent  the  profligate  waste  that  is 
taking  place  under  private  ownership  of  these  resources 
by  having  the  Government  take  such  steps  as  may  be 
necessary  providing  for  the  nationalization  of  the  coal 
mining  industry  of  the  United  States." 

As  to  the  relative  merits  of  the  policy  of  national 
ownership  as  advocated  by  the  United  Mine  Workers  of 
America,  and  the  policy  of  free  competition  and  unre- 
strained private  initiative  advocated  by  the  organized 
operators,  it  is  for  the  informed  public  ultimately  to 
judge.    For  two  years,  the  miners'  nationalization  resolu- 


THE  STRAIT  GATE  109 

tion  stood  as  the  expression  of  a  more  or  less  vague 
aspiration,  a  more  or  less  vague  faith  that  public  owner- 
ship would  check  overdevelopment  and  so  eliminate  the 
humanly  demorahzing  effects  of  intermittent  production 
and  irregularity  of  employment.  Nationalization,  the 
miners  believed,  would  go  far  to  correct  the  disastrous 
moral  and  physical  effects  of  a  situation  which  on  an 
average  of  ninety-three  days  in  each  working  year,  de- 
prives them  of  the  opportunity  to  work. 

At  their  next  national  convention,  held  in  Indianapolis 
in  1921,  they  themselves  recognized  the  controversial 
nature  of  their  nationalization  policy.  So  they  moved  to 
less  debatable  ground.  They  created  a  Nationalization 
Research  Committee  to  get  at  and  secure  the  publication 
of  facts.  In  his  first  public  address  as  chairman  of  this 
Nationalization  Research  Committee,  Mr.  John  Brophy, 
president  of  the  organized  miners  in  district  No.  2,  Cen- 
tral Pennsylvania,  instead  of  dogmatizing  about  the 
miners'  policy  of  public  ownership  and  democratic  admin- 
istration as  the  infallible  remedy  for  the  evils  of  the  coal 
industry,  appealed  to  the  public,  the  operators,  and  the 
miners  "to  stop  theoretical  squabbling  and  cooperate  with 
us  in  making  all  facts  about  the  industry  available  to  the 
public.  We  believe  in  intelligently  planned  industry.  We 
believe  that  the  only  method  for  the  intelligent  organiza- 
tion of  the  industry  is  nationalization.  The  employers 
disagree.  In  order  to  arrive  at  a  decision  we  ask  them  to 
submit  the  facts  to  the  American  people,  the  only  jury 
that  has  a  right  to  pass  judgment  on  the  case.  .  .  .  We 
ask  immediate  legislation  for  centralized,  continuous,  and 
compulsory  fact-finding  in  the  coal  industry." 

A  democracy  that  acquiesces  in  its  own  ignorance  of 
the  elementary  facts  respecting  an  industry  upon  which, 


110  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

not  only  its  own  economic  life,  but  also  the  economic  life 
and  civilized  progress  of  the  entire  world  so  largely  de- 
pends, betrays  the  high  privilege  and  responsibility  of  a 
self-governing  citizenship.  Today  neither  the  public  nor 
the  Government  knows  whether  the  coal  industry  is  fairly 
capitalized,  what  the  extent  and  value  of  the  coal  reserves 
are,  whether  depreciation  and  depletion  charges  are  rea- 
sonable, or  what  are  the  profits  and  losses  of  the  industry. 
Nobody  knows  whether  the  prices  which  the  consumer  is 
required  to  pay  are  fair  and  reasonable.  Nobody  knows 
precisely  what  the  preventable  wastes  of  the  industry  are. 
The  annual  wages  of  the  miners  are  not  subject  to  precise 
statistical  statement,  nor  does  anyone  know  the  number 
of  hours  the  miners  work  when  the  mines  are  in  opera- 
tion or  the  number  of  hours  they  are  given  opportunity  to 
work.  The  statements  we  have  are  for  the  most  part 
large  averages  based  upon  inductions  from  small  cross- 
sections  of  the  industry.  The  working  conditions  of  the 
miners,  the  technical  state  of  the  organization  of  work 
underground,  the  cost  of  living  at  the  more  than  eleven 
thousand  mines,  remain  in  the  foggy  realm  of  guesswork, 
estimate,  and  speculation.  In  the  face  of  conditions 
which,  as  the  operators  of  Illinois  and  Indiana  stated  in 
1914,  "endanger  the  lives  of  the  miners,  waste  the  coal 
reserves,  and  deprive  the  operators  of  any  hope  of  profit," 
the  people,  like  the  people's  government,  are  ignorantly 
helpless.  In  the  absence  of  essential  information,  the  pub- 
lic especially  at  times  of  controversy  within  the  indus- 
try is  left  to  the  mercy  of  prejudiced  and  partisan  propa- 
ganda. 

"I  think  it  is  plain  folly,"  Dr.  Garfield,  formerly 
head  of  the  Fuel  Administration,  testified  before  the 
Senate  Committee  on  Manufactures,  "not  to  provide  for  a 


THE  STRAIT  GATE  111 

continuous  finding  of  the  facts  as  to  the  cost  of  produc- 
tion, as  to  the  stocks  of  coal  on  hand,  as  to  the  working 
conditions  in  the  mines,  and  as  to  the  cost  of  living.  .  .  . 
We  cannot  get  along  as  a  Government  or  as  an  industry, 
whether  you  think  of  it  from  the  standpoint  of  the  opera- 
tors or  mine  workers,  without  knowing  the  facts,  and  the 
public  is  also  vitally  interested  in  these  facts." 

The  U.  S.  Geological  Survey  has  in  the  past  issued : 

1.  Annual  report  on  the  production  of  coal  by  coun- 
ties and  by  producing  fields.  2.  Annual  report  on  the 
movement  of  coal,  showing  the  state  or  locality  to  which 
coal  produced  in  each  district  is  shipped ;  and  the  origin, 
by  producing  fields,  of  the  coal  consumed  in  each  state  or 
locality.  3.  Current  reports  at  frequent  intervals,  show- 
ing production  of  coal,  operating  conditions  at  the  mines, 
and  the  movement  of  coal  by  rail  and  by  water  to  various 
consuming  districts.  4.  Occasional  reports  on  stocks  of 
coal  in  the  hands  of  representative  consumers.  5.  Annual 
reports  on  consumption  by  the  larger  users.  6.  Special 
reports. 

But  while  the  methods  to  be  used  in  these  reports  have 
been  worked  out,  not  all  of  them  are  being  carried  on  per- 
manently, the  reason  being  lack  of  funds.  The  latest  de- 
tailed annual  report  on  the  movement  of  coal  is  for  1918, 
and  it  is  uncertain  when  another  can  be  prepared.  The 
current  reports  are  inadequate  and  the  reports  on  stocks 
and  consumption  are  issued  only  at  irregular  intervals. 

Even  the  annual  reports  of  production  leave  untouched 
many  subjects  of  vital  importance.  We  have  no  quanti- 
tative information,  on  a  national  scale,  as  to  the  amount 
of  coal  cleaned ;  the  amount  of  mine-run,  slack,  and  pre- 
pared sizes  produced;  the  mechanical  equipment  of  the 
mines ;  the  depth  of  the  coal  workings ;  the  distance  the 


112  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

miner  must  traverse  from  mine  mouth  to  working  face; 
the  dip  of  the  coal  seam;  the  tonnage  produced  by  long- 
wall  or  room-and-pillar  methods ;  the  quantity  of  coal  in 
the  ground  lost  to  the  nation  each  year,  in  the  roof,  in 
pillars,  because  of  squeezes;  or  the  quantity  lost  in  thin 
seams  not  now  minable  which  are  broken  and  fractured 
by  the  mining  of  lower  seams.  We  do  not  know  accu- 
rately how  fast  electrical  haulage  is  replacing  animal 
haulage  underground,  what  progress  the  loading  machine 
is  making  in  relieving  human  backs  of  the  labor  of 
shoveling  coal  into  cars.  Of  course,  any  operator  and 
any  miner  knows  of  these  things  in  a  general  way  in  his 
own  locality,  but  such  scattered,  hazy,  local  knowledge 
will  not  suffice.  We  must  have  accurate  information, 
national  in  scope. 

In  the  realm  of  the  financing  of  coal  companies  the 
ignorance  of  the  public  is  almost  complete.  We  do  not 
know  the  capital  value  of  the  coal  deposits,  nor  the  degree 
of  concentration  and  control  of  ownership  of  mines  or 
mineral.  We  do  not  even  know  who  owns  the  coal  beds. 
There  is  no  list  of  the  landholding  companies  who  as 
landlords  absorb  in  many  districts  the  economic  rent  paid 
by  the  mines  working  favorable  seams.  We  do  not  know 
the  prevailing  royalty  rates,  we  do  not  know  whether  or 
not  there  is  a  soft-coal  trust.  The  most  basic  of  our 
American  industries  moves  in  fog  by  day  and  blackness 
by  night. 

The  social  creeds  of  the  Christian  churches  will  remain 
the  expressions  of  vague  aspirations  until  they  are  sup- 
plemented by  the  knowledge  essential  to  their  concrete 
definition.  Men  and  women  who  profess  allegiance  to 
the  Great  Commandments  of  Jesus  have  come  to  realize 
that  the  Kingdom  of  God  on  Earth,  the  Brotherhood  of 


THE  STRAIT  GATE  113 

Man,  cannot  be  built  by  fiat  or  verbal  proclamation.  The 
building  of  a  worthy  civilization  is  as  definitely  an  engi- 
neering enterprise  as  the  building  of  the  Panama  Canal. 
It  demands  a  scientific  procedure  and  a  patient  devotion 
as  thoroughgoing  as  that  v^hich  during  the  past  two  hun- 
dred years  has  gone  into  the  development  of  the  steam 
engine,  the  aeroplane,  or  high-tension  electric  transmis- 
sion. The  theory  of  nationalization,  like  the  theory  of 
collective  bargaining  and  the  traditional  theory  of  prog- 
ress by  free  competition,  must  each  be  tested,  as  the 
existing  social  and  industrial  order  must  be  tested,  in  the 
light  of  painfully  ascertained  facts,  and  in  terms  of  their 
effect  upon  the  individual  personality. 

For  it  is  only  in  the  light  of  the  truth  that  we  shall  be 
able  to  build  a  civilization  in  which  the  individual  person- 
ality may  find  full  fruition.  It  is  only  by  the  aid  of 
knowledge  and  human  understanding  that  we  shall*  be 
able  to  resolve  the  drama  of  civilization  into  a  victory  of 
the  consciousness  of  kind  over  the  warfaring  acquisitive 
instinct.  It  is  only  by  making  the  technique  of  science 
obedient  to  the  Great  Commandments  of  Jesus  that  we 
shall  be  able  to  build  a  civilization  worthy  of  a  world  that 
moves  through  infinite  space  with  the  sun  and  the  march- 
ing stars. 


WHAT  TO  READ 


A  Select  List 

American  Economic  Reviezv.    New  Haven,  Conn, 
Supplement.     March,  1921. 

Archbald^  Hugh 
Four-Hour  Day  in  Coal.     N.  Y.    H.  W.  Wilson  Co.     1922. 
148  pp. 

Block,  Louis 

Coal  Miners*  Insecurity;  Facts  about  Irregularity  of  Em- 
ployment in  the  Bituminous  Coal  Industry  in  the  United 
States.    N.  Y.    Russell  Sage  Foundation.    1922.    50  pp. 

Brophy,  John 

See  United  Mine  Workers  of  America,  District  No.  2,  and 
United  Mine  Workers  of  America,  Nationalization  Re- 
search Committee. 

Campbell,  M.  R. 
Coal  Fields  of  the  United  States.     Wash.     Govt.  Printing 
Office.     1917.     33  pp.     (U.  S.   Geological  Survey.     Prof, 
paper.     100-4.)     Map,  tables,  diagrams. 

Commons,  J.  R.,  ed. 
Trade  Unionism  and  Labor  Problems,  2d  series.     Boston. 

Ginn  &  Co.     1921.    838  pp. 
Contains: 
Edgar    Sydenstricker.      Settlement    of    Disputes    under 

Agreement  in  the  Anthracite  Industry,     pp.  495-524. 
Ethelbert   Stewart.      Equalizing   Competitive    Conditions. 
pp.  525-533. 


WHAT  TO  READ  115 

Commons,  J.  R.,  and  others 
History  of  Labour  in  the  United  States.    N.  Y.    Macmillan 
Co.     1918.    2  vols. 

Eckel,  E.  C. 
Coal,  Iron  and  War;  A  Study  in  Industrialism,  Past  and 
Future.     N.  Y.    Henry  Holt  &  Co.     1920.    375  pp. 

Evans,  Chris. 
History  of  the  United  Mine  Workers  of  America  from  the 
Year  1860  to  1900.     Indianapolis.     United  Mine  Workers 
of  America.    1920.    2  vols. 

GiBBINS,  H.  DE  B. 

Economic  and  Industrial  Progress  of  the  Century.     Phila. 
Bradley-Garretson  Co.,  Ltd.     1903.    524  pp. 

GiDDINGS,  F.  H. 

Principles  of  Sociology.     N.  Y.     Macmillan  Co. 

Gilbert,  C.  G.,  and  Pogue,  J.  E. 
America's  Power  Resources;  the  Economic  Significance  of 
Coal,  Oil  and  Water  Power.     N.  Y.     Century  Co.     1921. 
326  pp. 

Great  Britain.    Coal  Industry  Commission 
Reports  and  Minutes  of  Evidence.     London.     H.  M.  Sta- 
tionery Office.     1919.    3  vols.  (Cmd.  359-361.) 

Hammond,  J.  L.  and  Barbara 
Skilled  Labourer,  1760-1832.     N.  Y.     Longmans,  Green  & 

Co.     1919.     397  pp. 
Town  Labourer;   1760-1832.     N.   Y.     Longmans,   Green   & 

Co.    1918.    346  pp. 
Village   Labourer,   1760-1832;  A   New    Civilization.     N.   Y. 

Longmans,  Green  &  Co.     1921.    342  pp. 

Hapgood,  Powers 
In  Non-Union  Mines;  the  Diary  of  a  Coal  Digger.     N.  Y. 
Bureau  of  Industrial  Research.     1922.    48  pp. 

Hodges,  Frank 

Nationalization   of   the    Mines.      N.    Y.     Thomas    Seltzer. 
Prof.  d.    1920. 


116  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

Lane,  W.  D. 
Civil  War  in  West  Virginia;  A  Story  of  the  Industrial  Con- 
flict in  the  Coal  Mines.     N.  Y.     B.  W.  Huebsch.     1921. 
128  pp. 

Lauck,  W.  J. 

Summary,  Analysis  and  Statement  Before  the  United  States 
Anthracite  Coal  Commission.  Wash.  United  Mine 
Workers  of  America.     1920.    44  pp. 

The  Trade  Union  as  the  Basis  for  Collective  Bargaining,  a 
Compilation  of  Sanctions  and  Experiences.  Wash. 
United  Mine  Workers  of  America.     1920.     171  pp. 

What  a  Living  Wage  Should  Be  as  Determined  by  Authori- 
tative Budget  Studies.  Wash.  United  Mine  Workers  of 
America.     1920.    7  pp. 

Mitchell,  John 
Organized  Labor,  Its  Problems,  Purposes  and  Ideals  and 
the    Present   and   Future    of   American   Wage    Earners. 

Phila.    American  Book  and  Bible  House.     1903.     436  pp. 

MooRE,  E.  S. 
Coal;  its  Properties,  Analysis,  Classification,  Geology,  Ex- 
traction, Uses  and  Distribution.     N.  Y.     John  Wiley  & 
Sons.     1922.    462  pp. 

Murray,  W.  S.,  and  others 
Superpower  System  for  the  Region  between  Boston  and 
Washington.    Wash.    Govt.  Printing  Office.    1921.  261  pp. 
(U.  S.  Geological  Survey,  Professional  Paper.     123.) 

Roy,  Andrew 
History  of  the  Coal  Miners  of  the  United  States,  from  the 
Development  of  the  Mines  to  the  Close  of  the  Anthracite 
Strike  of  1902.    Columbus,  O.    J.  L.  Trauger  Printing  Co. 
1907. 

Saward,  Frederick  W. 
Saward's  Annual;  a  standard  statistical  review  of  the  coal 
trade,  by  Frederick  W.  Saward.     N.  Y.     1922.    254  pp. 

Shaler,  N.  S. 
Man  and  the  Earth.   N.  Y.   Chautauqua  Press.   1907.  240  pp. 


WHAT  TO  READ  117 

Spur,  J.  E.,  ed. 
Political  and  Commercial  Geology  and  the  World's  Mineral 

Resources;   A    Series   of   Studies   by   Specialists,    1st    ed. 

N.  Y.    McGraw  Book  Co.    1920. 
Coal.    By  G.  S.  Rice  and  F.  F.  Grout,  pp.  22-54. 

SUFFERN,  A.   E. 

Conciliation  and  Arbitration  in  the  Coal  Industry  of  Amer- 
ica.   Boston.    Houghton  Mifflin  Co.    1915.    376  pp. 

Survey  Graphic.    New  York 
Coal  Number.    April,  1922. 

United  Mine  Workers  of  America,  District  No.  2 
Facts!    Clearfield,  Pa.    1921.     16  pp. 
Government  of  Coal.    Clearfield,  Pa.    1921.    24  pp. 
Miners*  Program.    Clearfield,  Pa.    1921.    6  pp. 
Why  the  Miners'  Program?    Clearfield,  Pa.    1921.    10  pp. 

United  Mine  Workers  of  America.     Nationalization  Research 
Committee 
Compulsory  Information  in  Coal;  a  Fact-Finding  Agency. 
Clearfield,  Pa.    John  Brophy,  President,  U.  M.  W.  of  A., 
District  No.  2.    1922.    28  pp. 

U.  S.  Bituminous  Coal  Commission 
Majority  and   Minority   Reports.     Wash.     Govt.    Printing 
Office.    1920.    120  pp. 

U.  S.  Congress.    House.    Committee  on  Labor 
Investigation  of   Wages   and   Working   Conditions   in   the 
Coal-Mining  Industry.    Hearings  on  H.  R.  11022.    Wash. 
Govt.  Printing  Office.    1922.   Vol.  1.   443  pp.    Nolan  Com- 
mittee on  Bland  Bill. 

U.  S.  Congress.    Senate.    Committee  on  Education  and  Labor 
West  Virginia  Coal  Fields.     Hearings  pursuant  to  S.  Res. 

80.     Wash.     Govt.  Printing  Office.     1921.    2  vols.     (67th 

Cong.,  1st  Sess.) 
West   Virginia    Coal   Fields.      Personal   views    of   Senator 

Kenyon    and    views    of    Senators    Sterling,    Phipps,    and 

Warren.     Wash.     Govt.    Printing   Office.      1922.     30   pp. 

(67th  Cong.,  2d  Sess.    S.  Report  No.  457.) 


118  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

U.  S.  Congress.    Senate.    Committee  on  Interstate  Commerce 

Increased  Price  of  Coal.    Hearings  Before  a  Subcommittee 

Pursuant  to  S.  Res.  126.     Wash.     Govt.  Printing  Office. 

1919.     4   vols.      (66th    Cong.,    1st    Sess.)      Frelinghuysen 

Committee. 

U.  S.  Congress.    Senate.    Committee  on  Manufactures 
Publication  of  Production  and  Profits  in  Coal.     Hearings 
on  S.  4828.    Wash.     Govt.  Printing  Office.     1921.    3  vols. 
(66th  Cong.,  3d  Sess.)     La  Follette  Committee. 

U.   S.  Congress.     Select  Committee  on   Reconstruction  and 
Production 
Reconstruction  and  Production.     Hearings  pursuant  to  S. 
Res.  350.     Wash.     Govt.  Printing  Office.     1921.     3  vols. 
(66th  Cong.,  3d  Sess.) 

U.  S.  Federal  Trade  Commission 
Cost  Reports.    Coal.    June  30,  1919.    Wash.    Govt.  Printing 

Office.     1919-1921. 
Report  ...  on  Anthracite   and   Bituminous   Coal.     Wash. 

Govt.  Printing  Office.    1917.    420  pp. 

U.  S.  Geological  Survey 

Mineral   Resources   of   the   United   States.     Wash.     Govt. 

Printing  Office.     1881-date. 
Weekly  Report  of  Production.    Wash.     Geological  Survey. 
1917-date. 

U.  S.  Immigration  Commission 
Reports;  Immigrants  in  Industries.    Wash.    Govt.  Printing 
Office.    1911.    Vols.  6,  7,  16. 

Warne,  F.  J. 

Coal-Mine  Workers;  a  Study  in  Labor  Organization.    N.  Y. 
Longmans,  Green  &  Co.     1905.    252  pp. 

Webb,  Sidney  and  Beatrice 
History  of  Trade  Unionism.     Rev.  ed.   extended  to   1920. 
N.  Y.    Longmans,  Green  &  Co.     1920.    784  pp. 

Webb,  Sidney 
Story  of  the  Durham  Miners  (1662-1921).    London.    Fabian 
Society.     1921.    145  pp. 


WHAT  TO  READ  119 

COAL  INDUSTRY— PERIODICALS 

Coal  Age.  (Weekly.)  McGraw-Hill  Publishing  Co.  N.  Y. 
10th  Ave.  and  36th  St.    C.  E.  Lesher,  editor. 

Coal  Review.  (Weekly.)  Official  organ  of  National  Coal  Asso- 
ciation. Wash.,  D.  C,  Commercial  National  Bank  Bldg.,  14th 
and  G  Sts.    John  B.  Pratt,  editor. 

United  Mine  Workers'  Journal.  (Bi-monthly.)  United  Mine 
Workers  of  America.  Merchants  Bank  Bldg.  Indianapolis. 
Ellis  Searles,  editor. 


INDEX 

PAGES 

Accidents   44-47,  81 

Acquisitive  instinct  9-12, 16, 18, 38 

Agriculture    23-24 

America   23-33 

American  Federation  of  Labor  57-58 

American  miners'  association    53 

Anthracite  industry    54 

Anthracite  strike,  1902  48, 62-64, 66-71 

Arbitration  and  conciliation 48-49,  54-56,  58-59, 63-65 

Associations    18-19 

(See  also  Miners'  unions;  Operators'  associations.) 

Avondale  disaster 45-46 

Baer,  George  F.  (quoted)    63, 107 

Blossburg,  Pa 41-42 

Brophy,  John  109 

By-products  of  coal    96-99 

Calder,  William  M 106 

Central  competitive  field  66 

Child  labor    13-15 

Church  and  industry    50, 113 

Civil  War  (U.  S.)   Z7,  41, 53 

Civilization    1 1-21 

Clearfield,  Pa 56 

Coal  resources  of  U.  S 26, 79 

Coal  resources  of  world 8-9,  78-79 

Collective  bargaining    54,  59-77 

Committee  on  war  and  the  religious  outlook    50 

Company  stores  40-43 

Consciousness  of  kind  9-12, 16-21 

Consumption  of  coal    80-81 

Economic  surplus   2, 10-12, 15 

England  22, 23 


INDEX  121 

PAGES 

Exploitation  of  coal 24, 27, 38 

Fact  finding 35,68, 105-107, 110-113 

Federal  trade  commission 35, 105 

Finance    112 

Frelinghuysen,  Joseph  S 106-107 

Fuel  administration  29-36, 90-91 

Garfield,  G.  A.  (quoted)   30,  111 

Geological  survey  79,  11 1 

Geology  of  coal  4-6 

Giddings,  F.  H.  (quoted)    17 

Gilbert,  Chester  G.  (quoted)   83-84, 97 

Gompers,  Samuel 57-58 

Government  investigations    106-107 

Government  regulation    27-36 

(See  also  Fuel  administration;  Naturalization.) 

Hammond,  J.  L.  and  Barbara  (quoted)    13-15 

Hanna,  Mark  55, 63 

Hawkins,  Sir  John 13 

Hazards   44-47, 81 

Hoover,  Herbert  (quoted)   34 

Immigrant  miners  42 

Imperialism     25 

Industrial  democracy    50-53 

Industrial  revolution  2,  6-9, 22-23 

Inventions   8, 102 

Isolation     ' 40 

Kenyon,  William  S 106 

Knights  of  labor  57, 61 

Lane,  Franklin  K 91 

Leeky,  W.  E.  H.  (quoted)  13 

Lesher,  C.  E.  (quoted)     31-32 

Lloyd,  Thomas 53 

McBride,  John    59 

Management     76 

Mine  inspection    44-48 

Miners    13-15 

Miners'  job  43-44 

Miners'  national  association  54-58 


122  THE  COMING  OF  COAL 

PAGES 

Miners'  unions   20, 38-49,  52-65 

Mining  law  44-48 

Mining  towns  40 

Mitchell,  John    61-65 

National  civic  federation    6Z 

National  coal  association    72, 107 

National  federation  of  miners  and  mine  laborers  59 

Nationalization 77, 108-110 

Natural  gas 87-88 

Operators    46-47, 105 

Operators'  associations    72-75, 106-107 

Overdevelopment   27-28, 59 

Pennsylvania,  Secretary  of  internal  affairs  43 

Petroleum    83-87 

Pogue,  Joseph  E.  (quoted)  83-84, 97 

Population  and  coal    c 7-8 

Power     80,  88,  90-101 

Power  distribution   80 

Public  opinion   42, 44 

Public  utility,  coal  as  a 31-32, 64 

Parsons,  Floyd  W.  (quoted)   79 

Railroad  administration  31-32 

Railroads 28,  31-32, 80 

Rend,  W.  P 59 

Roosevelt,  Theodore    48, 63-64, 66-67 

Roy,  Andrew  (quoted)    39,42,44-45 

Rushmore,  D.  B.  (quoted)   79 

Scrip     42 

Sherman  law    73,77 

Shortage  of  coal  29 

Siney,  John 54-56,  58 

Smith,  G.  O.  (quoted)    80 

Solar  power 1 

"Statement  of  facts"  105 

Steel  industry  65-66 

Steinmetz,  Charles  P.  (quoted)    88 

Strikes    40-41, 48, 62-64, 66-71,  75 

Superpower  plan  92-96, 100-101 


INDEX  123 

PAGES 

Transportation  of  coal    28, 31-32, 80 

Tryon,  F.  G.  (quoted)    27,77 

Unemployment  81 

United  mine  workers  of  America 61-77, 108-109 

War    2, 26 

Wastes     26,38, 59,  76,  80-82,96 

Water  power   88 

Weaver,  Daniel   52-53 

Webb,  Beatrice  and  Sidney  (quoted)   50-51 

West  Virginia   40, 48,  61, 65-66,  74 

Wilson,  William  B 63 

Wilson,  Woodrow    71 

Workingmen's  benevolent  association  54 


YB   18995 


